With the current neon shortages appearing to fan out across the globe, news has emerged from Japan of the first measures being implemented to reduce consumption of the gas.
Gigaphoton, a manufacturer of excimer lasers, began offering a comprehensive recovery package this summer, called the ‘Neon Gas Rescue Programme’.
Targeting semiconductor producers in particular, the neon recovery programme has been introduced to cope with the recent uncertainty regarding the procurement of the gas.
Neon has historically been in over-supply. While the former Soviet Union manufactured all of its oxygen plants for steel mills with neon, krypton and xenon capabilities and formerly worked on high-powered lasers as weapons, giving rise to significant neon capacity, from 1990 to 2012 many of these eastern European plants simply blew the crude neon to the atmosphere as no one would buy it.
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