this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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When I was young my Dad bought me some mercury home from work.. I loved how it moved when I shook the bottle and the weight of it.
When I had my own kids I didn’t want it around, so our local council had set up a event where you could dispose of household liquids like old paints and solvents, so I took it down. When I drove up, the guy asked me what I was disposing of so I said mercury. It was bizarre. I was told to stay in the car and a guy came out of a shed in a full hazmat suit with one of those pairs of metal tongs to retrieve it from me.
I remember Dad telling me that miners used to collect gold pan tailings in mercury and then of a night they would hollow out a potato and put the mercury in, and then put that in the camp fire.. it would burn off the mercury and leave a little ingot of gold.
We also had an innocent looking little (maybe 100ml or 200) bottle of mercury at school. Mostly for the startling weight when it was passed around to demonstrate density.
Out in the edge of the lower mainland of BC by Hope, where there was a mini gold rush a long time ago you can find lots and lots of mercury sitting below the water levels when the streams dry out during the summer.
It is all left behind from the miners back in the day.
That sounds like it would look really lovely. Got any pictures?
Mercury sitting below the ground level sitting underground, potentially poisoning the ground water if it gets disturbed enough is beautiful or just the area of nature where the gold panning happens?
Yale Town Gold Panning Reserve
Hope Gold Panning Reserve
It's a shitty situation, but that doesn't preclude it from possibly being beautiful to look at.
Probably because they didn't know WHICH type of mercury you had. Organic mercury can kill on touch with a single drop. Best not to take chances.
Source? I'm not sure who to believe. People on the internet who claim it's safe enough that you can pick it up or people on the internet who claim kills you if you touch it.
I'm not going to go swimming in a mercury pool any time soon either way.
Chemist (and biochemist) here. Organometallic compounds of Mercury are primarily dangerous because Mercury ions bond fairly strongly to soft ligands like sulfhydryl groups found near the active sites of enzymes. This can result in the displacement of the metal ions or otherwise disrupt the structure needed for enzyme functionality. Mercury metal OTOH is considerably less reactive. It is not safe to breathe in for prolonged periods of time but it is no where near as toxic as its organometallic derivatives are. Dimethyl Mercury for example, is extremely dangerous. A single drop has 100+ times the organomercury content needed to kill someone.
It's actually harmless if not ingested. They were being weird.
Its also harmless, generally, when ingested as the gastrointestinal absorption of elemental mercury is negligible. It is inhalation that is most concerning with elemental mercury.
Except eating paint chips with lead made a lot of kids dumb. Lead based paint held up awesome, but it was banned due to injection. Not inhalation. Even now, 40+ years later it's still the leading cause of lead poisoning in children.
I mean… we’re talking about mercury here, not lead.
Oh, fuck me. Lol. I commented last night and then responded back today and in between my mind totally flipped to thinking it was about lead.