People don't hesitate to spend $100 or more on a set of tritium night sights. Why are they so expensive? I understand tritium is "rare and expensive", but you can buy a whole tritium watch for $75.
You figure the price of a set of decent night sights is 20-25% of the price of an average gun. This has to be one of the most marked up accessories ever. It's the equivalent of paying
$6-7,000 for an "upgrade" on your average $30,000 car. What am I missing?
During the so-called "cold war", when nuclear weapons were all being developed and built, tritium gas was one of the many things that that this research "brought us"; in the beginning, tritium was needed in the "triggers" for thermonuclear weapons, and at the time, the DOD's sole producer of tritium was the Mound Laboratory at Miamisburg, Ohio; (none of this was known until many years later, but living maybe 20 miles from Miamisburg, all of this became discussed in the media in the
Like many things that had their beginnings in weapons research, tritium eventually became available in very small quantities to private industry, albeit at very considerable cost; being a radioactive isotope, just like all things that are radioactive, tritium has what's known as a "half-life"; various different radioactive isotopes lose half of their radioactivity in X number of years; for some things, the "half life" is thousands of years; for other things, it's measured in just a few hours; The half-life of tritium is fairly short, and in maybe 10 years, night sights containing tritium will become much less visible.
You mentioned watches that use tritium; I read about that quite some years ago, and yes, tritium was used in watches, but I'm guessing that they were all quite expensive; for many years, all "glow in the dark" watch faces used radium; radium has a very long half-life, but unfortunately, it also has has a tremendous amount of "energy", and hundreds of young women who worked with radium in making these "glow in the dark" watch faces eventually died from radiation poisoning, and radium became illegal to use for this purpose.
I have read someplace that Trijicon and one other maker of gun sights were the only ones to get access to tritium gas, and then only in very small quantities. I'm sure there are others on GT that are far more knowledgeable about all of this than I am.
