Perma-Fix Environmental Services said Monday it is progressing toward renewal of its Washington state Dangerous Waste Regulations permit for its low-level and mixed-low-level radioactive waste processing facility in the city of Richland.
The permit for the Perma-Fix Northwest plant, near the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, expired in 2010 and has yet to be renewed. But because Perma-Fix filed a timely application for renewal in 2009, state law allows it to continue to operate under the permit as the proceedings continued. The state has three times asked for more information on the application. The company’s most recent filing, submitted in February, is being evaluated for acceptance.
“The state understands the importance of Perma-Fix as it relates to the closure mission at Hanford,” Perma-Fix President and CEO Mark Duff said Monday during a conference call on the company’s latest earnings report. “A lot of wastes at Hanford … wouldn’t have any other alternatives, or if it did, would be very expensive.” The majority of waste Perma-Fix handles comes from Energy Department sites, including Hanford.
Perma-Fix Northwest also has the support of the Hanford-area community, as a public hearing in Richland in mid-March showed, Duff said. Local community leaders at the hearing urged the state Department of Ecology to move forward with a revised permit for Perma-Fix Northwest.
“We’re very comfortable with where we are in the community and we have that support,” Duff said. “The state has been working well with us the last year or so.”
In late January, the Department of Energy awarded a $4.8 million contract to a joint venture that includes Perma-Fix — Aerostar Perma-Fix TRU Services — for the second phase of the Test Bed Initiative for processing low-level radioactive tank waste from Hanford. Phase 2 is scheduled to be completed this year, starting with receipt of the waste in the fall.
The project includes extracting 2,000 gallons of low-level liquid waste from a Hanford double-shell tank, shipping the waste to a Perma-Fix treatment facility for treatment and solidification into a possibly grout-like form, and then shipping the waste to Waste Control Specialists’ repository in Texas for disposal.
The company and the state of Washington disagree over whether Perma-Fix Northwest’s current permit or a renewed permit would cover the Test Bed Initiative. “As we sit today, we have all the permits we need and they are very well defined,” said Louis Centofanti, executive vice president of strategic initiatives. Ecology officials have said they want to address permitting the initiative after it completes renewal of the existing permit.
If permitting issues with Washington state cannot be worked out, the waste would be shipped to a company site in Tennessee rather than Perma-Fix Northwest, Duff said. “It’s certainly our desire and hope that we would be able to do it at (Perma-Fix) Northwest, and at this point, we could expect it there,” he said. If it does need to be sent to Tennessee, shipping costs would be fairly minimal, Centofanti said.
Perma-Fix is encouraged that the Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal 2020 contains $10 million for DOE to continue the Test Bed Initiative, Duff said. The money would be for the third phase of the initiative, which would demonstrate production level scalability by treating 300,000 to 500,000 gallons of tank waste. The first phase, completed in 2017, covered treatment of 3 gallons of waste at Perma-Fix Northwest.
The Test Bed Initiative approach to tank waste treatment and disposal would supplement plans to treat low-activity waste at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, starting by a federal court deadline of 2023. But the plant was never planned to be large enough to treat all of Hanford’s 56 million gallons of tank waste in a reasonable time. One option is to expand the plant, but a May 2017 Government Accountability Office report referenced Waste Control Specialists estimates that grouting waste could cost up to $16.5 billion less than the expansion and additional operation costs for the vitrification plant.
Waste Facility Outage Hits Perma-Fix Revenue in 4Q
The Atlanta-based company said Monday its fourth-quarter revenue slid from $12.6 million in 2017 to $11.7 million in 2018, largely due to the unexpected temporary shutdown of the Perma-Fix Northwest operation.
Management stopped work to address procedural concerns in processing of low-level radioactive waste at the Richland plant. The roughly two-week outage in December generated an $800,000 hit to revenue, Duff said during the earnings call.
Perma-Fix is also still paying for the nearly completed closure of its M&EC waste treatment facility in Tennessee, he said.
Perma-Fix reported a $2.1 million operating loss for the quarter, compared to a $1.2 million loss in the same period of 2017. The $2.4 million net loss from continuing operations was a steep drop from $340,000 in income in fourth-quarter 2017. The net loss attributable to common stockholders was similar: $2.4 million, or $0.20 per share, down from $260,000 in net income, $0.02 per share, in 2017.
In a Monday press release, Perma-Fix noted that fourth-quarter 2017 earnings were buoyed by a $1.7 million tax benefit from the federal 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
For the full year, Perma-Fix reported a nearly $1.1 million loss from continuing operations in 2018. That improved significantly on a $3.5 million loss in 2017.
Quarterly revenue in Perma-Fix’s treatment business rose by $333,000 year over year, while revenue in the services segment dropped by $1.2 million “due to lower project revenue, which is timing related and was impacted by the completion of certain phases of one of our ongoing contract,” Chief Financial Officer Ben Naccarato said during the call with financial analysts.
“As recently reported, we have been awarded several new projects in March that we believe will further increase our funded backlog and bolster our Services Segment beginning in the second quarter of 2019,” Duff said in the release. “We look forward to formally signing and announcing these projects in the coming weeks, which include remediation work in Canada as well as several U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) locations throughout the United States. We estimate the total contract value of these awards collectively to be approximately $17 million through 2019 alone.”
