The Bromine Chokepoint
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The Bromine Chokepoint
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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#2Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of pretty much every month.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#3Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of pretty much every month. I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
Nothing ever happens eh?
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#4I have a sense of complacency regarding all these. There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#5I have a sense of complacency regarding all these. There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute. Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almos…
>There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...
[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#6Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#7The more efficient a system is (due to specialization and removal of redundancy), the more fragile it becomes.
That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#8[flagged]
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#9Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of pretty much every month. I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
Nothing ever happens eh?
Nothing Ever Happens Bias has served me pretty well on those dubious semiconductor supply chain claims.
The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.
First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.
It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#10[flagged]
Boy do you need to look in a mirror.