Comment by csnover
1 day ago
The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
> The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.
In reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses very little bromine compared to say, plastics; and that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production in the US).
Your comment, like most in this thread, confuses ordinary bromine with semiconductor-grade pure bromine.
The semiconductor industry does not use ordinary chemical substances, but only special semiconductor-grade pure substances, which are many orders of magnitude more pure than the so-called "pure" substances that are used elsewhere in the chemical industry.
It is absolutely irrelevant that substances like ordinary bromine and ordinary silicon are very abundant and very cheap. The semiconductor industry cannot use them and the corresponding semiconductor-grade pure substances are far more expensive and their availability is limited by the production capacities of the very few producers that exist for them around the world.
If the few existing production plants for any semiconductor-grade pure substance were destroyed, semiconductor device manufacturing would be stopped for a few years, until new purification plants are built.
TFA argues that in order to avoid such risks, there should be more purification plants in geographically-diverse locations, for instance that one such purification plant should be built in USA, where there are local producers of ordinary bromine, that would provide the raw material.
I clicked through on the link that the article said showed that bromine was impossible to recycle. The abstract says "Here we propose a catalytic strategy that enables the selective and mild-condition conversion of all organobromides present in wastes into renewed bromides for Br recycling. It employs Ullmann-type reactions enabled by inexpensive Cu(I), simple ligands and hydroxides in DMSO–H2O solvent. This strategy achieved >95% bromide yields at a temperature ≤120 °C for complex real-world Br-laden wastes."
I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
You overlook the "long time" in your last sentence.
Of course any of these problems can be solved in a long time, 5-10 years.
The article is talking about the problems of between potentially supply being shut off tomorrow and being fixed in "a long time". Not good times.
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> I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
What decisions or risk management can I reasonably take to mitigate the Bromine chokepoint? Or most of these deep pipeline logistics issues?
Try to plan purchase with more lead time, look for alternatives beyond the original sales market, accept alternatives with less than originally desired specs or accept more than desired price?
When are those not prudent anyway?
I can't make a bromide conversion plant, and my influence on governments is minimal.
The push for efficiency, global outsourcing, global supply chains and JIT manufacturing have been great for the economy, but they assumed a level of reason and stability that can’t be assumed long term.
We went from supply chain shocks due to COVID, to a sift landing, to inflation, to supply chain instability due to tariffs, to petrochemical instability due to stupidity and ego. Plus the delusion that AI is going to fix everything Real Soon Now.
I don’t know how businesses make rational long range plans when the major actors are operating far from rational.
The US willingly jump into the Short Victorious trap without planning. We retired our Minesweepers, four of 11 carries are in process for repair, refurbishing, and refueling. Our allies are fine with letting us clean up our mess. And our diplomatic strategy seems to be Because we said so.
So when the big things are being handled this badly, I’m sure plenty of little things are ready to bite us in the ass.
Plan for future market contractions, refocus on profitability over growth, assume future scaling plans may not be feasible
Invest in futures contracts to make the price for you more predictable and within a narrower range.
> It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.