Comment by tonyarkles

Right, makes perfect sense.

So this is pretty far outside of my area of expertise, but https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8133363/ suggests that there may be an evolution of Birkeland-Eyde that isn’t nearly as bad as the original process was. I haven’t gone through this in detail and even if I had I probably don’t have the background to do it justice.