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).
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.
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.
Israel’s enemies have been launching missiles in to Israel for decades.
Why is only now a problem?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.
It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
How many of us thought "hmm I wonder what the next one of these is, and how do I invest"?
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140705163239/http://na.unep.ne...
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?
This is a difficult target, with far more defences to overwhelm.
Doing so would have far-reaching consequences.
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-association-com...
I guess not.
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.