Buyers of Red Mercury
During the collapse of the Soviet Union, a substance called “red mercury” was one of the most sought-after commodities hawked on black markets. The price of a kilogram could be as much as $300,000.
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The substance was supposed to have nuclear applications. It was said to help guide precision munitions and to make a bomb that would go undetected by radar. It was also claimed that it was critical for the design of stealth aircraft, but all this has been ruled out by scientific experts.
In 1991 and 1992, dozens of hucksters and con men flooded Russian government agencies with requests to export the substance. They claimed that they could produce it themselves or had reliable connections to those who could. They alleged that rich foreign customers were waiting for the substance, and all they needed were export quotas from the government to make the money.
Who Are the Buyers of Red Mercury?
Vladimir Putin was chairman of the city’s External Relations Committee (KVS), which awarded export quotas to companies that made red mercury. His committee was dominated by gangsters and businessmen, and Putin’s team gave their business partners a leg up by awarding them access to lucrative export quotas.
But Putin never approved the sale of this “reliable” material to Russia’s military or the CIA. After all, the substance is a hoax, and no military agency has ever developed it or used it.
Rather, Alkor’s product was just ordinary mercury pyroantimonate, which is available for about $3,000 a kilogram. And, in fact, a Russian government laboratory concluded that Alkor’s substance did not have any military application.
Then, three con men posing as real estate agents from Hosur, a suburb of Bangalore in India, wooed a group of rich buyers with power-point presentations and scan reports from a US-based lab. They convinced them that eight pounds of “red mercury” was worth Rs. 150 crore, and offered them a sample to confirm that it was genuine.
Their scheme failed, and they were arrested. They were later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
When the era of using mercury in chlorine and caustic soda manufacturing ended, a major impact on the price of the metal was expected. This was because tons of the material was going to be available for sale, storage and recycling.
There are still a number of uses for mercury, though the majority of them have been phased out. Elemental mercury is found naturally in coal and other fossil fuels, but it is also released into the environment by volcanoes and forest fires. In addition, manmade emissions of mercury from the burning of coal, oil and wood as fuels for energy production and from the burning of waste products, such as municipal and medical waste, are still a problem.
The safest way to read a temperature is to use a thermometer that doesn’t contain mercury. There are many such thermometers on the market. These devices are a safer and more economical alternative to mercury. Some have dual scales that display dry and wet temperatures, while others provide a humid reading by comparing the dry and wet numbers on an enclosed chart.