Commissioning the DEMO plantDear Pip,
No matter how good the news is you have find something to complain about. Okay, I will concede that maybe Ucore going slow was not due to money being tight. Pip, this Ucore, remember? They don't do quick. Every I dotted, every T crossed and triple checked. There is fifty two stages to the DEMO plant and we don't know how many sub systems there are for each stage. They have turn it on and run acid mix through it and then tweek it to peak efficiency. Then they have it triple checked that they got it right. Nobody has done this before. It is not like they build a couple of hundred plants and have thousands of hour running the plants the world over. All the while keeping it a secret. Air gapped computers and all paperwork check in and out each day and not a cell phone with a camera or copy machine in sight. Like where I worked. Try getting a quick answer out of a nuke engineer, I would wait up to seven days just for them to run through the problem let alone get an answer.
Also we don't know if an outside engineer is not looking over there shoulder. Say one from DOD. It is not unheard of for DOD to do that. I worked on three contracts that had a engineer observer clause in them. One even had a clause for a company of US marines went it got to a certain stage.
I agree that a progress report on the commissioning of the DEMO plant would be a great press release this summer.
I did get ananswer back from Mark, there is not six feed stock companies talking to Ucore. They are coming out of the woodwork people. So no there will be no problem getting feedstock. With Pat's history with OEMs and DOD interested there is no problem finding someone to buy the oxides.
In other words Ucore is a choke point company.
Dragon