Perma-Fix, Atlanta, turned a profit in the second quarter of the year as revenues rose and the company regained what its CEO called pre-pandemic momentum.
On a call with investors last week, CEO Mark Duff also said that Perma-Fix is on a team fighting to force the Department of Energy and the court system to award it the next big liquid waste contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Perma-Fix’s second-quarter net income was about $474 million, or 3 cents a share, compared with a loss of about $1.5 million, or 11 cents, in the 2022 quarter. Quarterly revenue rose to about $25 million from around $19.5 million a year ago, according to the company’s latest 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At Perma-Fix’s Services segment, which provides waste management, nuclear decommissioning and site remediation services, quarterly gross profit, which excludes taxes and other non-operating expenses, rose to about $3.7 million from about $2.3 million. Quarterly revenue rose to about $12 million from roughly $11 million in 2022.
“The increase in revenue in the Services Segment was due to continuing full operational status on certain projects which had been curtailed/delayed primarily in the early part of 2022 due, in part, from the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Perma-Fix wrote in its latest 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Meanwhile, Duff said on an earnings call with investors last week that Perma-Fix was part of a losing bid for the Department of Energy’s $45-billion Integrated Tank Disposition Contract, which this summer got tied up in the federal court system and sent back to DOE for review in June. The judge in the case cited technical problems with the winner’s corporate registration and blocked performance on the contract.
In May, losing bidder Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, a team led by Atkins Nuclear with Jacobs and Westinghouse, sued the government over DOE’s April decision to award the contract to Hanford Tank Waste Operations and Closure: a team led by BWX Technologies with Amentum and Fluor. It was not widely known at the time that Perma-Fix was part of the losing bidder.
In Perma-Fix’s earnings call last week, Duff painted the court’s decision as a big win for the losing bidder. Though the court made no such prescription in its ruling, Duff said that sending the contract back to DOE meant the award would either be reversed or scrapped altogether.
“DOE has two primary options which could include awarding a project to our team or rebidding the contract for a third time through a new procurement,” Duff said on last week’s earnings call. “We anticipate learning more about the DOE decision for this initiative in the third quarter of this year.”
In an unsealed order filed June 30, Judge Marian Horn said DOE “should reassess the procurement, including consideration of the intervenor’s [Hanford Tank Waste Operations and Closure] proposal and the protestor’s [Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance’s] proposal.”
Horn also left the door open for either party to come back to court after DOE makes its decision.
Editor’s note, Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, 12:27 p.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to include details of the Court of Federal Claims’ order that the Department of Energy reassess its award of the Integrated Tank Disposition Contract.
