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The Bromine Chokepoint

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#51

Post by weird_tentacles »

chromacity wrote: post #17
csnover wrote: post #13

Earlier 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,…

> 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 worl…

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#52

Post by weird_tentacles »

nradov wrote: post #27
chromacity wrote: post #2

Ah, 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...

I think I heard we're also running out of attention span?

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#53

Post by tyre »

arjie wrote: post #4

I 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…

The issue is that these areas are optimized for—so we don’t build capacity or the surrounding infrastructure for fallbacks—and relatively small likelihood events have tremendous risk-adjusted costs.

If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.

Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#55

Post by dripdry45 »

varispeed wrote: post #11
mullingitover wrote: post #8

[flagged]

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 deeper. Larry Ellison and money is at the center of most of this.

Check out the Drey Dossier stuff and how it pulls lots of these strings together. Jared Kushner, Terry Wiles, Ellison... Lebanon, Gaza, even Iran. It’s all a big business interest grabbing for huge resources in the Middle East and in Africa.

It is not at all about the Epstein files, that’s just a smoke screen, and they don’t care. It’s about establishing an extra governmental organization, the board of peace, designed to take over the civil service, technology, and perhaps ultimately the military of the place is where Ellison installs civil, servants and technology, holding their data and their government hostage. It is designed to be an oligarch government outside of all governments. Basically a super villain ring from the movies.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#56

Post by scythe »

Animats wrote: post #31

No, 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 US production in your linked article is listed as "W". This is explained as "Withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data". But imports consistently exceed exports, so it appears that US production is not likely to make up a global shortfall.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#57

Post by CamperBob2 »

chasil wrote: post #6

Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa. https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...

What eventually happened with the neon crunch? Those cities are still under Russian control, correct?

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#59

Post by boondongle »

Animats wrote: post #31

No, 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…

Part of the real confusion people have is - so many things about current trade are due to "current economic decision making". That is, something isn't rare or unable to be done elsewhere but that it's been done this way for efficiency of all involved.

There's often a really weird undercurrent of nationalism that springs up in these dicussions as if its' "a country" that does something well as a function of being that country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.

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