Dr. Boyd DavisDr. Boyd Davis, wherefore art thou? Maybe Ucore's learned it's better for him to not make any statements than to make statements touting RSX's advantages without mentioning speedup or cost savings. Perhaps his views on RSX have matured with 7 months of CDF commissioning work under his belt, to the point where he'll be comfortable making speedup or cost savings claims if he sees them justified, or not if that's how it comes out. My guess is he won't be comfortable making a statement that RSX produces speedup or cost savings until CDF commissioning is complete, which may or may not ever happen. BTW (speculation), I wouldn't rule out Ucore making what I consider to be a bogus declaration of completion of commissioning before the CDF and RSX is operating at a level commensurate for what should justify such a declaration.
Disclaimer: the rest of this post is pure speculation.
Could the next Ucore pivot be that the OEM's need for Ucore's REOs is so time-critical that Ucore should move immediately to construction of SMC1 without ever completing CDF commissioning? Is it time to book a U-Haul from Kingston to Louisiana?
RSX might be great. Or it might be the case that Ucore will never get it working at all at anything other than a lab scale. Probably doesn't help that Ucore fired the team which invented RSX. It remains to be seen whether Ucore can even get SX to work at demo plant scale, let alone commercial scale.
On the other hand, it might be that CDF commissioning is right around the corner, and Ucore has RSX humming.
But my suspicion since the day the IMC team was fired in Feb 2022 is that the RSX independent testing results were not that great, and Ryan was pissed at IMC for overselling RSX, and there was a dispute in which Ryan wanted to put out a PR on independent testing results with big speedup claims, which IMC team was unwilling to put their name on, so adios IMC team. But my suspicion could be wrong.