By John Stang
Perma-Fix Environmental Services said Thursday it nearly doubled its earnings for the third quarter of 2019, aided by contract wins and increased efficiencies.
The Atlanta-based nuclear services and waste management provider posted $22.5 million in revenue for the latest quarter, up 88% from $12 million for the same period last year. The company’s gross profit grew from $1.8 million to $5.2 million on a year-over-year basis, while net income bumped up from $221,000 to $1.8 million.
Net income per common share ended up at $0.15 for the third quarter of 2019, compared to $0.02 per common share a year earlier.
The company’s earnings boost derived primarily from a spike in its services business, which provides radiological cleanup, nuclear decommissioning, and other resources. The segment collected $12.4 million in revenue due to signing several new contracts in the third quarter of 2019. That was nearly $10 million more than the $2.9 million in revenue reported for the same quarter in 2018.
The waste treatment section’s revenue rose from $9.1 million in the third quarter of 2018 to $10.1 million in the third quarter of 2019.
For the first nine months of 2019, Perma-Fix’s revenues totaled $51.4 million, compared to $37.8 million for the first nine months of 2018. The net income for the same nine-month periods rose from $863,000 in 2018 to $1.3 million in 2019.
“We are seeing the benefits of our strategic initiatives of the last few years,” said Perma-Fix President and CEO Mark Duff in a conference call with analysts on Thursday.
That included new contracts during the quarter with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, plus customers in Canada. After the teleconference, Perma-Fix declined to discuss the details of the procurements beyond citing two press releases from earlier this year that announced the signing of a total of $32 million worth of contracts.
Duff said the GeoMelt waste treatment project at its Richland, Wash., facility has performed well since its early 2019 startup. The system, which uses vitrification technology owned by Veolia, can convert contaminated sodium wastes, generated from sodium coolants in nuclear reactors, into a glass form for disposal. Perma-Fix is eyeing a market of about $100 million worth of sodium-laced radioactive wastes, starting with drums from the Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan that have been stored for decades at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory.
Perma-Fix executives did not discuss the Hanford Test Bed Initiative during the Thursday conference call, and a company spokesman declined to comment on the project afterward. The planned three-part pilot program involves converting low-activity radioactive waste from the Hanford Site in Washington state into a grout form for disposal.
If successful, the test could open the door for treating some percentage of Hanford’s low-activity waste via grouting rather than the Waste Treatment Plant being built at Hanford to vitrify the majority of the 56 million gallons of waste held in underground tanks. About 90 percent of that waste, generated by decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons, is believed to be low-activity.
The second phase of the trial program, encompassing 2,000 gallons of waste from Hanford, has been expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Phase 1, finished in December 2017, involved extraction of 3 gallons of waste from underground tanks at Hanford, moving it by truck to the nearby Perma-Fix Northwest plant for chemical stabilization and immobilization, and then to the Waste Control Specialists low-level waste disposal facility in Texas.
A potential third phase could treat upward of 500,000 gallons of low-activity waste.
