I've found the reason (I think) 90% of the world's semiconductor-grade neon production is concentrated in one country. Per this German government whitepaper about the noble gas industry: the USSR massively overinvested in neon capacity in the 1980's, in order to build space-based excimer laser weapons. Ukraine's extant plants date (probably) to the 1980's; they're responsible for a global oversupply that's persisted since the Cold War.
- "Neon was regarded as a strategic resource in the former Soviet Union, because it was believed to be required for the intended production of laser weapons for missile and satellite defence purposes in the 1980s. Accordingly, all major air separation units in the Soviet Union were equipped with neon, but also krypton and xenon, enrichment facilities or, in some cases, purification plants (cf. Sections 5.4 and 5.5). The domestic Soviet supply of neon was extremely large but demand low."
- "Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, global crude neon production was approximately 500–600 million l/a (= 500,000–600,000 m3/a). It was dominated by far by large-scale air separation units associated with metallurgical combines in Russia and Ukraine. Simultaneously, demand was estimated at around 300 million l/a (cf. Section 4.2). In the years between 1990 and 2012, therefore, most crude neon was not purified, but released into the atmosphere, because there was no customer base."
Given this piece of information, it's hard to see how 500-600,000 m3/a could be used for the lasers used in chip manufacture. Even if the whole world production drops by 99.9%, there's probably going to be more than enough for those lasers to continue working.
Edit: it also appears that the current state of the art chip manufacturing does not use excimer lasers anymore [1], and the prior generations used them, but not with Neon, but rather with Kripton and Argon.
Those krypton fluoride and argon fluoride lasers are exactly the lasers that use neon, even though "neon" is not in their name and their respective Wikipedia pages do not currently mention it. See for example this 2016 announcement from laser supplier Gigaphoton:
"Gigaphoton to Begin Field Evaluations for Neon Gas Recycling System “hTGM”"
In KrF and ArF excimer lasers, which are used in advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, neon accounts for over 96% of laser gases used as the buffer gas. However, the cost of neon gas has risen sharply, reaching 5 to 20 times previous prices due to difficulty in obtaining it, a situation brought about by a worldwide neon supply shortage that has continued since 2015. In response to the situation, in July of 2015 Gigaphoton launched the "Neon Gas Rescue Program" in order to provide support to customers in sustaining stable high-volume manufacturing environments.
Of the three program options Gigaphoton previously announced plans of launching in 2016, the company has now completed development of its neon gas recycling system "hTGM," and will begin field evaluations of the system this month. hTGM makes it possible to reuse laser gas by connecting directly to the conduit of lasers in operation at semiconductor plants, collecting the used gas, removing impurities, and then re-injecting it back into the laser. This system is both eco-friendly and provides the greatest possible recycling rate without impacting the operation of laser equipment. hTGM also features an extremely efficient design that allows up to five lasers to be connected to a single unit. At present, the company has decided to begin evaluations for KrF lasers at user facilities from the end of February, after which it plans to progressively apply the system to ArF lasers as well.
Did the US have a similar project? I'm aware of Project Excalibur, but I think that was significantly more ambitious (nuclear powered x-ray laser) and wasn't developed nearly as far.
Those government-run reserves always seem a bit silly to me. There's nothing special about the reserving business that normal private sector companies can't do.
(Especially if you abolish anti price gouging laws.)
If they could do it, we would have let them. But due to market failures throughout the course of history, we have learned to apply hysteresis to markets by stockpiling reserves and offering price supports in times of oversupply. The alternative is boom and bust cycles, which is fine for some markets like cryptocurrency and tulips, but bad for food and other necessities.
What kind of market failures are you talking about?
Robust futures markets are perfectly capable of protecting producers and consumers from price fluctuations (and help stabilize prices as they do so). Similarly for long term contracts between consumers and suppliers.
Futures markets and long term contracts don’t help people eat. You can’t eat food that doesn’t exist due to droughts, floods, freezes, fires, or pestilence.
Stockpiling is a rather straightforward operation. In addition, the benefits of stockpiling are both rivalrous and excludable. Ie stockpiles are not a 'public good'.
So the private sector is perfectly capable of stockpiling, too.
But the private sector generally doesn't stockpile, because the cost of maintaining a stockpile exceeds any immediate economic benefit of doing so. It is economically inefficient almost all of the time. Very occasionally it becomes useful, but current accounting practice, corporation law and shareholder demands do not have mechanisms for incentivising it.
One of the key roles of government is to provide services that are economically inefficient but are a public good.
When companies often last less than 50 years, they have no interest in preparing for events that happen every 50 years. If they did, it only makes it more likely that a competitor would out-compete them.
By your logic, Warren Buffett should have been able to buy spend just a dollar or so to buy insurance against someone getting everything right, shouldn't he? After all, the chances were exceedingly small and competition would have driven down the insurance premium?
The private sector is perfectly capable of providing security? Private sector entities store and handle valuable stuff all the time.
(Government) control is another issue. Obviously, a government run scheme would be under more government control. Though laws are perfectly capable of controlling private sector entities, too.
Security is not profitable until a crisis hit, why would a private company in the JIT business world care about the security of a society if it's not profitable until it is? That's exactly how you get price gouging...
- "Neon was regarded as a strategic resource in the former Soviet Union, because it was believed to be required for the intended production of laser weapons for missile and satellite defence purposes in the 1980s. Accordingly, all major air separation units in the Soviet Union were equipped with neon, but also krypton and xenon, enrichment facilities or, in some cases, purification plants (cf. Sections 5.4 and 5.5). The domestic Soviet supply of neon was extremely large but demand low."
- "Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, global crude neon production was approximately 500–600 million l/a (= 500,000–600,000 m3/a). It was dominated by far by large-scale air separation units associated with metallurgical combines in Russia and Ukraine. Simultaneously, demand was estimated at around 300 million l/a (cf. Section 4.2). In the years between 1990 and 2012, therefore, most crude neon was not purified, but released into the atmosphere, because there was no customer base."
https://www.deutsche-rohstoffagentur.de/DE/Gemeinsames/Produ... (chapter 5.2)
For context, this would have overlapped with Energia/Buran's launch of the Polyus weapon (which was a megawatt CO2 laser).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)