PERMA-FIX, KURION TEAM UP TO USE VIT TECHNOLOGY

Perma-Fix Enviromental Services announced yesterday a new partnership with Kurion Inc. to employ that company’s GeoMelt In-Container Vitrification (ICV) system at Perma-Fix’s facility in Richland, Wash., near the Department of Energy’s Hanford site. Perma-Fix hopes to use the technology to treat both federal and commercial waste, with an eye to eventually treating some low activity wastes from Hanford. “We believe that this collaboration will allow us to treat a variety of highly complex nuclear waste streams that we believe currently have no other commercially available treatment and disposal options,” Lou Centofanti, chairman and CEO of Perma-Fix, said yesterday. “It could be used for Class B and C and GTCC.”

Kurion’s GeoMelt ICV system is a modular, deployable in-container application of vitrification. “The ICV is ideal for tank, mixed, debris-laden or pre-containerized waste streams where temperature, glass former and process flexibility is important to address waste streams with varying and/or challenging chemistries and densities,” Perma-Fix and Kurion wrote in a statement yesterday. As of yet, there is no date by which the ICV technology will be established at Perma-Fix’s facility, Centofanti said. “We’re working those details out now. No timeline to give you at the moment, but they have a unit and we have a facility. We have to go through some permitting with the state, so it’s not clear at this point how long it would take.” If the technology is successful in Richland, Centofanti said “We could install it at our other facilities, Oak Ridge in particular. [But] for now we’re focused on Hanford.”