Perma-Fix, Atlanta, closed out a tough 2022 with bigger losses and less revenue than a year ago, but the ill-effects of COVID-19 on the company’s business tapered off last year, the chief executive officer said last week.
“While 2022 was a challenging year due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed projects in both the Treatment and Services Segments, we believe we are back on the growth trajectory,” Mark Duff, Perma-Fix’s CEO, said in an earning press release on Thursday.
Among the bright spots on the horizon, Duff pointed to DOE’s recent decision to dispose of some solidified liquid waste from the Hanford Site in Washington state as low-level radioactive waste. With the agency’s decision formalized, Perma-Fix believes it will receive some 2,000 gallons worth of tank waste, to be solidified in concrete-like grout, “in late 2023,” Duff said in the release.
For the year, Perma-Fix lost about $3.8 million, or 29 cents a share, down from a profit of about $835,000, or seven cents a share, in 2021. The company posted an operating loss of more than $3.3 million in 2022, down from an operating loss of about $4.8 million in 2021.
Revenue for 2022 fell to $70.6 million from $72.2 million a year ago, owing to a $2-million decrease, to $37.2 million from $29.2 million year over year, in the Services segment, which provides waste management, nuclear decommissioning and site remediation services.
Perma-Fix’s fourth-quarter loss was about $1.7 million, or 13 cents a share, narrower than the $2.5 million, or 19 cents a share, the company lost in the 2021 quarter. Tough comparisons were partly to blame, Perma-Fix wrote in its latest 10-K earnings filing, because the services segment completed a “large project” in the second half of 2021.
The revenue that the large project represented “was not replaced with a similar size contract because of delays in contract awards and procurement from COVID-19 impact which continued into the first half of 2022 and eased through the second half of 2022,” Perma-Fix said in the 10-K, filed Thursday.
Perma-Fix Environmental Services was the Department of Energy’s contractor for a 2019 cesium spill at the University of Washington’s Research and Training Building at Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle.
The building, contaminated after a mishap by a contractor handling a cesium blood irradiator as part of a program administered by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, was released back to the Washington Department of Health on May 3, 2021.
