By John Stang
Perma-Fix Environmental Services executives said Wednesday they see the potential for at least $5 million in annual revenue from a specialized radioactive waste vitrification system now being tested.
In a conference call to discuss Perma-Fix’s latest quarterly earnings, President and CEO Mark Duff said there is enough contaminated sodium wastes at nuclear facilities to reach that $5 million annual target. In January, the company announced it had entered into a contract for Veolia Nuclear Solutions to install its patented GeoMelt radioactive waste vitrification system in Perma-Fix’s Richland, Wash., waste treatment facility. The companies will jointly test the technology’s capacity to convert the waste – produced by nuclear-reactor coolant – can be converted into a glass form for safe disposal.
The companies expect to complete installation of the system by the third quarter of this year and to begin testing before the end of 2018. The initial tests are supposed to be conducted on small volumes of contaminated sodium wastes from Hanford and the Idaho National Laboratory.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta-based waste management company is not saying much about a separate technology that could be used to treat radioactive waste from the Department of Energy.
Perma-Fix is already testing whether some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored at DOE’s Hanford Site, just outside Richland, could be mixed with a concrete-like grout for disposal.
Bechtel is building the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford to vitrify the material, a byproduct of decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. However, the project is years behind its original schedule and its price tag has risen to roughly $17 billion. Under a federal court order, DOE has until 2023 to begin treating Hanford’s low-activity waste and until 2034 for the Waste Treatment Plant to be fully operational.
The first phase of Perma-Fix’s test bed initiative grouted 3 gallons of waste, which was then shipped to Waste Control Specialists’ disposal complex in West Texas. Perma-Fix has submitted a draft report on the findings of the first phase of the test bed initiative (TBI),
It has sent a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy to tackle the second phase, which is expected to take a year and involve 2,000 gallons of waste. Perma-Fix spokesman David Waldman declined to elaborate on the details of the second-phase proposal. A third bigger, yet-to-be-defined test phase could occur later.
In the teleconference, Duff said DOE has awarded two new TBIs to Perma-Fix, but declined to elaborate: “Unfortunately, we’re not at liberty to provide any details,” he said.
Perma-Fix’s revenue in its first quarter of 2018 was flat from the year before, but it still earned positive income compared to a net loss in 2017. “Our financials are improving,” Duff said.
Revenue landed at $12.7 million in the first quarters of both 2017 and 2018. However, gross profit jumped from $2.7 million to $3.3 million on a year-over-year basis. Net income spiked from a $727,000 ($0.06 per share) loss in 2017 to earnings of $136,000 ($0.01 per share) this year.
Duff attributed the improvement to streamlined operations and expanding its market base in its treatment and services businesses.
Perma-Fix operates facilities in Florida, Tennessee, and Washington state for treatment of radioactive and other waste types. Lower waste volume was the prime contributor to a revenue reduction from $10 million in first-quarter 2017 to $9 million in the latest reporting period.
Perma-Fix’s services segment, which covers everything from radiological safety to management of NORM and TENORM radioactive materials, chalked up an extra $1 million in quarterly revenue, from $2.7 million last year to $3.7 million this year.
