Nuclear remediation and waste treatment provider Perma-Fix Environmental Services on Wednesday reported improvements in both revenue and operating loss for the first quarter of 2017.
The Atlanta-based company brought in $12.7 million in revenue for the three months ended on March 31, up from $10 million in the same quarter of 2017. Revenue in the waste treatment business rose from $7.2 million to $10 million, largely due to higher waste volume, according to a Perma-Fix press release. Services revenue slipped slightly on a year-over-year basis, from $2.8 million to $2.7 million.
The company lost $520,000 in the latest quarter, compared to a $3.6 million operating loss for first-quarter 2016. The update bodes well for the remainder of 2017, as CEO Lou Centofanti noted in the release that the first quarter is generally the weakest in any given year.
Perma-Fix racked up a $14 million loss through all of 2016.
Another positive sign is the enacted waste treatment budget for fiscal 2017 and proposed budget for the next fiscal year in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), Centofanti said. The DOE office, charged with cleanup of legacy nuclear arms sites, received a 3% budget bump to about $6.4 billion in the fiscal 2017 omnibus spending plan President Donald Trump signed last week. EM would receive $6.5 billion in fiscal 2017 in the White House budget proposal outlined in March; the full plan is expected on May 22.
Perma-Fix’s earlier work for the Environmental Management office has included a treatment and disposal subcontract for cleanup of the Hanford Site Central Plateau in Washington state and treatability studies and other work at DOE’s West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York. The company is also testing a technology that could treat some portion of high-level radioactive waste now stored at the Hanford Site.
