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Comment by csnover | Hacker News Reader

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, 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?

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> 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 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).

I clicked through on the link that the article said showed that bromine was impossible to recycle. The abstract says "Here we propose a catalytic strategy that enables the selective and mild-condition conversion of all organobromides present in wastes into renewed bromides for Br recycling. It employs Ullmann-type reactions enabled by inexpensive Cu(I), simple ligands and hydroxides in DMSO–H2O solvent. This strategy achieved >95% bromide yields at a temperature ≤120 °C for complex real-world Br-laden wastes."

I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.

You overlook the "long time" in your last sentence.

Of course any of these problems can be solved in a long time, 5-10 years.

The article is talking about the problems of between potentially supply being shut off tomorrow and being fixed in "a long time". Not good times.

There is no difference between now and before this war started.

Israel’s enemies have been launching missiles in to Israel for decades.

Why is only now a problem?

Size, Scale, Intensity, and Intent.

All are different here.

Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are the IRGC's remote occupying armies in the adjacent territories of Gaza and Lebanon, and they have launched rockets into Israel on a near-daily basis for years.

The difference is Ham/Hez rockets are small, unguided, generally aimed at residential or commercial areas to cause disruption, and are generally low-intensity and are routinely intercepted.

The differences are:

1) The attacks from Iran are large warheads on intermediate range ballistic missiles, with precision targeting.

2) They are fired in coordinated barrages along with drones and other rockets specifically intended to over-saturate the Israeli missile defenses.

3) The attacks are also targeted specifically at industrial infrastructure with the intent of causing maximal damage to the world economy.

4) The targeting uses high-precision satellite data and intelligence from Russia and China to cause maximum global damage.

Those are major differences in both quality and quantity of the attacks.

Before, the risk was relatively low: not targeting this type of industrial site, not using high-intelligence and high-precision targeting, not saturating, and using small warheads unlikely to cause major damage.

The situation since 28-Feb-2026 is entirely different.

I mean, it’s not like Iran built those intermediate range ballistic missiles / hypersonics as yard ornaments for their underwater basket weaving community classes.

It’s not like the location of US bases in the area is a secret.

If Iran wanted to use those hypersonics in an act of defence they would target military installations only.

We can then safely assume that those intermediate range ballistic missiles have been used for their intended purpose: the intentional destruction of industrial and residential areas in Israel and industrial targets of US allies in the area.

The probability that those missiles would be used on those targets was always unity.

>>The probability that those missiles would be used on those targets was always unity.

Yup

In your assessment, unity.

In my assessment well above 80%, certainly so much that they IRGC missile program should have been dealt with decades ago.

But in the assessment of the rest of the market, both the stock market and the industry planning 'market', the probability was in single digits. Likely in no small part due to normalcy bias. If it had been any higher, they would have made backup and recovery plans already.

Of course, I think the US should have been making a stockpile of replacement power grid transformers, and requiring every house to have 1kW of solar power decades ago. But they don't.

It is the new situation in consideration of their lack of insight into the probabilities and planning that makes it different, no? Just because you an I can foresee a problem, doesn't mean everyone can, or will do anything about it. So now, if that target is not defended, the backup plan is years away instead of already running. Worse yet, if the backup plan was already running, targeting that production facility would be near-pointless...

Your comment, like most in this thread, confuses ordinary bromine with semiconductor-grade pure bromine.

The semiconductor industry does not use ordinary chemical substances, but only special semiconductor-grade pure substances, which are many orders of magnitude more pure than the so-called "pure" substances that are used elsewhere in the chemical industry.

It is absolutely irrelevant that substances like ordinary bromine and ordinary silicon are very abundant and very cheap. The semiconductor industry cannot use them and the corresponding semiconductor-grade pure substances are far more expensive and their availability is limited by the production capacities of the very few producers that exist for them around the world.

If the few existing production plants for any semiconductor-grade pure substance were destroyed, semiconductor device manufacturing would be stopped for a few years, until new purification plants are built.

TFA argues that in order to avoid such risks, there should be more purification plants in geographically-diverse locations, for instance that one such purification plant should be built in USA, where there are local producers of ordinary bromine, that would provide the raw material.

> 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 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.

Plan for future market contractions, refocus on profitability over growth, assume future scaling plans may not be feasible

Invest in futures contracts to make the price for you more predictable and within a narrower range.

The push for efficiency, global outsourcing, global supply chains and JIT manufacturing have been great for the economy, but they assumed a level of reason and stability that can’t be assumed long term.

We went from supply chain shocks due to COVID, to a sift landing, to inflation, to supply chain instability due to tariffs, to petrochemical instability due to stupidity and ego. Plus the delusion that AI is going to fix everything Real Soon Now.

I don’t know how businesses make rational long range plans when the major actors are operating far from rational.

The US willingly jump into the Short Victorious trap without planning. We retired our Minesweepers, four of 11 carries are in process for repair, refurbishing, and refueling. Our allies are fine with letting us clean up our mess. And our diplomatic strategy seems to be Because we said so.

So when the big things are being handled this badly, I’m sure plenty of little things are ready to bite us in the ass.

> 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.

Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.

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