I remember there war a neon chokepoint a few years back, helium chokepoint, lithium chokepoint, and probably a few more I missed in the news.
The Bromine Chokepoint
41–50 of 152 posts
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny they will blow up the world, just so they don't face the reality of Epstein files and kompromats in the archives of Moscow. Essentially cowards. and the reckoning will come anyway.
Look, it is calming to think that Trump is somehow a Russian agent, and not a sign of collapsing political class, but let’s be realistic here. If it is indeed true, then Russia managed to put its puppet as The President of the United States of America. Twice. Without triggering any red flags from a dozen or so of US TLAs. That would be the best intelligence operation in the history of everything. At that point, USA s…
yeah, so there were a lot of red flags from the IC. We just chose to ignore them and elect him anyway.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#43I 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…
Efficiency is the opposite of robustness.
You can’t have slack in a system and be efficient, because it would be more efficient to use up all 100% of the (cheapest) capacity.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between the two that capitalists chasing 1% margins discover only when there is a disaster somewhere.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#44No, there isn't likely to be a bromine shortage. The US is a major producer of bromine.[1] It's not at all rare. It's just that the cheapest source is the Dead Sea, because that's concentrated brine. There are bromine wells in Arkansas. It's a by-product from some oil wells. It's in seawater. In California alone, the Salton Sea and the SF salt evaporator ponds are potential sources. If the price goes up, the use of b…
That's not what the article is talking about as a chokepoint, and it does describe US bromine production.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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 accep…
Invest in futures contracts to make the price for you more predictable and within a narrower range.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#47I 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 les…
The Spruce Mine story was a classic case of this hysteria as there were other sources of pure silica e.g. Norway
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#48Ah, 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...
We will never run out of almost anything but pricing can go up (and down) as availability relative to demand changes.
So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#49No, there isn't likely to be a bromine shortage. The US is a major producer of bromine.[1] It's not at all rare. It's just that the cheapest source is the Dead Sea, because that's concentrated brine. There are bromine wells in Arkansas. It's a by-product from some oil wells. It's in seawater. In California alone, the Salton Sea and the SF salt evaporator ponds are potential sources. If the price goes up, the use of b…
The problem is high-quality hydrogen bromide, from the article.
"Critically, ICL’s hydrogen bromide gas production, including the semiconductor-grade output supplied to South Korean fabrication plants, is manufactured at the same Sodom facility where extraction occurs, meaning extraction and conversion infrastructure are co-located in the same vulnerable corridor."
Re: The Bromine Chokepoint
#50I really like this addendum:
"Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress."