Comment by adrian_b

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.