Thread: Liquid mercury
View Single Post
mjohnson mjohnson is online now
Registered
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Los Alamos, NM
Posts: 1,766
Garage
Just playing with very rough numbers:

An olympic swimming pool is basically 10x the peak global liquid mercury production and nearly 30x the more recent production quantities.
- "Typical Olympic Pool" = ~2500 m^3
- Hg density = ~13.3 Mg/m^3, or roughly 33k tons
- "annual global production of mercury metal" in Bing search gives
3-ish k tons as 1970s historic peak and 1200 tons in 2024


Dense metals are fun. For years I had a 30# rod of pure tantalum in my office. It was amazingly small! Coincidentally it's almost the exact density of delta-Pu so it made for great physical and radiographic test objects/masks.
__________________
'78SC, lots of other boring cars...
Old 09-11-2025, 05:38 PM
  Pelican Parts Catalog | Tech Articles | Promos & Specials    Reply With Quote #15 (permalink)