Today SSO announced that Pirquitas acheived "commercial production" on Dec 1st.

I am not really sure what exactly is different now, but I assume that it does mean that they feel that they can now achieve consistent and continuous production from the mine.

The recovery percentage will be down (as expected) until they have completed processing the oxide ores and start (in 1Q 2010) to process the sulphide ores that the plant was primarily built for.

Way to go SSO!

http://ir.silverstandard.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=428266