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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 bromine for pool chemicals and fracking fluids will be affected long before the semiconductor industry.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-bromine.pd...
"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."
In 1973, Velsicol Chemical Corporation, who was operating in St. Louis, Michigan at the time, was manufacturing Polybrominated biphenyl fire retardant, as well as animal feed supplements. They were bagged similarly, and PBBs were accidentally shipped into the food supply. Which led to the largest livestock culling in US history at the time. https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
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.
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...
I think the world is much, much more varied and complex than these "this is the one true doom" mindsets can fathom. It's a constructed theory that makes perfect sense until it meets the real world.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...
The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.
https://www.reportlinker.com/dataset/6b01d1a976f7ec9db71e35b...
However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.
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.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.
In reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses very little bromine compared to say, plastics; and that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production in the US).
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.
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 accept more than desired price?
When are those not prudent anyway?
I can't make a bromide conversion plant, and my influence on governments is minimal.
It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.
The article cites "multiple occasions" in which Iranian missiles got through and hit the Negev region. Follow the link and that's two incidents almost a month ago, when Iran tried to hit the nuclear research facility. They hit one town 35km north and another 20km to the west. Those are the only strikes the article cites in the area. That was in the early days of the war, when Iran was firing their most precise missiles, in direct response to US-Israeli attacks on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility and still...
The ICL bromine facility is another 25km to the west of that town, or 40km from the nuclear research facility. There's not a lot of industrial or residential in the area. If they manage to hit anything, it'll almost certainly be the evaporation pools.
Okay but then "The mechanism of disruption does not require a direct hit on an ICL facility" but then that paragraph is the most circumstantial. The mechanism is insurance rates, which apply for any ship that docks at an Israeli port? How are those going to go up any more than they already are with a near miss, and if so, how is that not just standard above-average wartime inflation? How are the ships with the bromine not going to get to South Korea via the Mediterranean if insurance rates rise?
But really what's the likelihood that Iran is going to fire off whatever of its remaining stocks of still very imprecise missiles are left, to try to hit a needle in a haystack target with nothing else around for collateral damage?
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
Same thing happened with oil in 70s -- everyone was sure that oil is going to end. But as with lithium I'm pretty sure the world would find another place to source bromine.
Despots will keep pushing their limits until they get punched in the nose, and so far the only limits they've hit have been a few angry parades.
I really don't understand the motivation, as British Petroleum (BP) was not a direct U.S. interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.
Why Mosaddegh was denied what Chavez was allowed is not clear to me.
By 1979 it was no longer possible to marshal public anger towards the UK whose empire had been completely dismantled. Meanwhile, the US continued to support the Shah's regime by selling weapons until 1979, and this was probably at least as important as the coup for the image of America as a public villain during the Islamic Revolution.
Essentially cowards.
and the reckoning will come anyway.
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 should just put the chairs away and turn down the lights.
Epstein files yes, I grant you that.
Not everything is about epstein.
Why do I feel like every war is an opportunity to create artificial scarcity?
That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
I hate title case.
"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."