It’s pretty obvious that once the sales for the game tanked after the initial release that Bethesda just wrote the game off and reallocated the resources to other projects. There is a good amount of potential in the setting if problems were fixed and mod tools were released but a lot of the bones of the game are just bland and uninteresting.
Mercury alone is safe enough to handle a bit where you would be mostly worried about breathing too much of its vapor. Organic compounds of mercury on the other hand can kill you within days of a drop touching your skin.