Perma-Fix Environmental Services has begun work on a second machine for segregating radioactively contaminated soils, with deployment planned within a period of months.
The initial Perma-Sort system has been in use in San Diego throughout the second quarter of 2020, Perma-Fix President and CEO Mark Duff said last month during the company’s conference call on its latest earnings.
“The performance of the system has exceeded expectation and has provided tremendous value to our clients, processing nearly 9,000 cubic yards a week and over 18,000 tons in just a few months,” he told financial analysts. “Our engineering team is moving quickly to fabricate and deploy a second Perma-Sort system in the coming months to support increasing demand.”
The second unit is expected to be ready for service by the fourth quarter of this year, Perma-Fix spokesman David Waldman said by email earlier this month. The cost of each unit is proprietary and not made public, he added.
In May, the Atlanta-based waste management provider announced completion and initial contracts for Perma-Sort, which it described as a “customized, conveyor-based radiological assay system designed to provide 100% characterization of material efficiently and with industry-leading measurement quality.”
By that time it had already picked up two contracts worth $3.7 million with the Department of Defense to process 100,000 tons of soil, debris, and other materials dredged from the San Diego harbor. The machine extracts radioactive materials from that waste for treatment. In that job, Perma-Fix is a subcontractor on a Navy contract through 2021, Duff said.
Ultimately, management anticipates having three units on hand by the close of 2021, for use in segregating radiological materials, Waldman wrote. “Hazardous markets such as Mercury, Beryllium, or UXO/MEC may demand additional units.”
Each machine could be good for $5 million to $7 million per year in revenue, depending on time of deployment, according to Duff.
“If they’re running all year long, it will be higher than that, but typically, they wouldn’t be,” he said in response to one analyst’s question. “So I think we could assume at this point that $5 million revenue per unit is a pretty good guess at this point.”
Duff emphasized the system’s waste-minimization capabilities, by redepositing processed soil where it came from rather than having to ship it to a landfill for disposal. That would assertively pursue environmental remediation projects, including as a partner on large-scale efforts, he said.
Perma-Fix is a member of a corporate team headed by Jacobs Engineering that will compete with eight other ventures for up to $3 billion worth of Department of Energy taskings for deactivation, decommissioning, and removal services around the nation.
Jacobs and Perma-Fix are also believed to have worked with Honeywell in a bid for the $13 billion Tank Closure Contract for the Hanford Site in Washington state. That deal went to a BWX Technologies-led venture, but the Energy Department is reconsidering its decision.
“Perma-Fix is currently developing applications to segregate mercury contaminated debris that will be generated as a result of demolition projects to reduce treatment and disposal costs for future DOE missions,” Waldman stated. “This research is progressing and we are confident in meeting high performance standards to reduce expensive waste disposition costs in Oak Ridge and other locations.”
The system could also be employed to process building debris and soil at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories in California, according to Waldman.
In June, Perma-Fix announced it had secured a $7 million contract for “remediation, demolition and waste management services” at Lawrence Berkeley. That came after the company in December announced a joint deal with ERRG for cleanup services at the lab.
