Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. (PESI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Larry Shelton, Chairman of the Board of Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. On behalf of the Board of Directors and management of Perma-Fix Environmental Services, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. This year, out of an abundance of caution to proactively deal with the unprecedented health impact of COVID-19 and to mitigate risk to the health and safety of our shareholders, communities and employees, we are holding our 2020 Annual Meeting of the Stockholders via live audio webcast. As Chairman of the Board, I will be presiding over the meeting. The meeting is held as scheduled in accordance with the notice of annual meeting mailed to our stockholders on or about June 12, 2020. I would now like to introduce our Board of Directors who are present at this virtual 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders: Dr. Louis Centofanti, Joseph Grumski, Joe Reeder, Zach Wamp and Mark Zwecker. Also in attendance today are David Waldman from Crescendo Communications, who manages the company's U.S. Investor Relations; and Bill Bishop, partner of our independent registered accounting firm, Grant Thornton, LLP. I'd like to bring your attention to the important disclosures relative to forward-looking statements and non-generally accepted accounting principles measures in today's presentation. I'll now turn it over to Ben Naccarato, the company's Chief Financial Officer and Secretary. Ben will walk you through certain formalities in connection with today's formal business. Following the formal business, the company's Chief Executive Officer, Mark Duff, will give a presentation on the company, and we will address any pertinent questions submitted to the virtual website, which Ben will discuss how to do so in a few minutes. It is shortly after 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and the meeting is officially called to order. Ben?

Thank you, Larry. Before we start our formal portion of the meeting, I'd like to run through a few rules and formalities for the annual meeting. Rules and procedures for the conduct governing this meeting have been posted to the virtual meeting website for your reference. [Operator Instructions] Questions will be addressed after the formalities of the annual meeting have been completed and following the CEO's presentation of the company. We will review all questions submitted and plan to address pertinent questions as time allows. In order to save time at the meeting, we've proposed to arrange the proceeding so that the votes will not be taken until all items have been moved and seconded. Shareholders who are attending the virtual meeting do have the options to vote during the meeting until the poll closes by clicking on the Voting link on the virtual website. However, please note that if you have already voted by proxy, you do not need to vote again, unless you want to change the vote that you previously provided. The company has appointed in advance of this meeting, Ms. Karen Siegel, Assistant Secretary, as inspector of election to conduct the vote on business to be transacted at this meeting. Ms. Siegel is present at this meeting to serve as the inspector. The inspector has signed the oath of office and has delivered to the Secretary for filing with the records of the meeting. An affidavit of the mailing has been delivered to -- by Continental Stock Transfer & Trust Company, the company's transfer agent, referring to the mailing about May -- June 12, 2020, of the notice regarding the Internet availability of proxy materials for the annual meeting to the stockholders of record of the company's common stock as of the close of business on June 2, 2020. In accordance with the bylaws, the Board of Directors set the close of business on June 2 as the record date to determine the stockholders that were entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting. In accordance with the bylaws, a complete list of the stockholders of outstanding common stock entitled to vote at and to receive notice of this meeting is available for inspection by the shareholders as further explained in the proxy statement. This list, which is as of the close of business on June 2, 2020, has been prepared by the transfer agent of the company. At the start of the meeting, presented either in person or by proxy, are a total of 9,239,889 shares of the company's common stock entitled to vote or 76.1% of such shares outstanding on June 2, 2020. Copies of the 2019 annual report to the stockholders and the proxy statement are available for any stockholder attending this meeting as posted on the virtual meeting website. I will now turn over the formal portion of the meeting back to our Chairman of the Board, Larry Shelton.

Thank you, Ben. I declare there is a quorum present and accordingly, this 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. is properly and lawfully convened and ready for the transaction of business. It is now time to proceed with the first item of business, which is the election of directors. In accordance with the provisions of the bylaws: Dr. Louis Centofanti, Joseph Grumski, Joe Reeder, Larry Shelton, Zach Wamp and Mark Zwecker, those nominees named in the proxy statement dated June 12, 2020, have been nominated by the Board of Directors to serve as directors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of the Stockholders. All nominees are nominated to serve in accordance with the provisions of the bylaws and until their respective successors are elected to be qualified. Mr. Zwecker moves for the nominations, and Mr. Reeder seconds. Being that no other nominations have been received, I declare the nominations to be closed. The second item of business is the approval of the first amendment to the company's 2017 stock option plan. The Chair will entertain a motion to vote for the approval of the first amendment to the company's 2017 stock option plan. Dr. Centofanti moves, and Mr. Grumski seconds. The third item of business is the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton, LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for 2020 fiscal year. The Chair will entertain a motion to vote for the approval of the appointment of Grant Thornton, LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for the fiscal year 2020. Mr. Naccarato moves, and Mr. Wamp seconds. The fourth and final item of business is the approval, on an advisory basis, the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers. The chair will entertain a motion to vote for the approval, on an advisory basis, the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers. Mr. Zwecker moves, and Mr. Reeder seconds. The Board recommends a vote for each of the 4 proposals. For anyone who wishes to vote electronically at this time, please do so. Remember, if you already voted your proxy, you do not need to vote again, unless you wish to make a change. I'll now pause for a couple of minutes for anyone who wishes to vote electronically at this time. [Voting]

I now declare the polls closed. While the votes are being counted, Mark Duff, President and Chief Executive Officer of the company, will provide a presentation on the affairs of the company. After the presentation, we will entertain questions from our stockholders. Mark, please proceed with the company's presentation.

All right. Thank you, Larry. Appreciate that setup. I assume that some people can see the slides and others can't. So I'm going to talk through some of the detail as if no one can see them, knowing that people are calling in. So we'll run through these. There's some discussion about -- preliminary discussions about who we are that a lot of you know about, and there's also some about where we're going and what we're doing and how we're growing at this point. So I'm going to jump to Slide 3, and I'll just give you the slide numbers as we're going through it. We are set up with 2 different distinctive segments and markets that we view as our core competencies. The first being the Treatment Segment, where we have licensed, permitted and operating facilities that are fixed base facilities throughout the country that we'll talk about. And then we also have the Services Segment, which is basically classified as all of the work that we do in the field outside of those treatment facilities. Those are our 2 segments, both are growing and have significant opportunity associated with them. Moving to Slide 4. As most of you know, we were founded in 1991 by Louis Centofanti. And we've been a recognized leader in the waste treatment industry for all this time, adding the services industry along the way and expanding on both. We have established laboratories and facilities that are very mature, with procedures, staff and technologies and methodologies, each one of those that have been proven to be very efficient and very important to the country in regards to the cleanup missions for some of the government facilities in the country as well as commercial. We have long-standing relationships with our clients, including the Department of Energy, the NRC, DoD and commercial entities as well. On the Services side, we have a large focus on the radiological protection services portion of the cleanup industry. And although we do have some projects that don't have a rad component, most of them do, and that's what sets us apart and is the health physics component associated with cleaning up contaminated facilities and soils and remediation. Moving to Slide 5. Our senior management team includes myself; along with Dr. Centofanti, who is Executive Vice President of Strategic Initiatives; Ben Naccarato as the CFO; Andy Lombardo as Executive Vice President for Nuclear and Technical Services. Slide 6 gives a general overview of our market overview. Right now, we are doing about 65% of our revenue with the Department of Energy, focused on the environmental management portion of the Department of Energy, the DOE. Along with that, we do have some work with the National Nuclear Security Administration, the NNSA, that's the weapons production side of the house and specialty nuclear materials group. Both of those, again, make up about 65% of our revenue, both on the Services side as well as the Treatment side. Along with them, we're seeing a growing portion of revenue associated with Department of Defense, particularly the Navy and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Navy with its Nuclear Propulsion Program as well as NAVFAC, where they're doing some cleanup initiatives out west that we're involved with as well as a very sustainable amount of nuclear propulsion waste processing that we do every year for mixed waste treatment. On the core side, we do a number of demolition projects around the country as well and have several bids out that we're working on for cleanup programs under what we call the FUSRAP program. We're also seeing a significant amount of growth in the commercial power industry associated with the nearly 100 reactors that are out there right now generating electricity. As they're coming off-line as well as they're in production mode of producing electricity, we take their waste as well as address some of the cleanup initiatives underway at various sites. We're also seeing growth in the mining industry in the oil and gas with the pipeline sludge removal and treatment for the oil and gas industry and NORM, team NORM, which is -- NORM is naturally occurring radioactive materials for both those industries that we're processing very efficiently for disposal. On the international side, we have initiatives in Italy and Mexico as well as the U.K. We received waste from the U.K. for the first time in 2019. And we have a significant portion of revenue in Canada. Let's drill down a little bit if we can on DOE on Slide 7. DOE, just to kind of demonstrate the sustainability of our markets, is funded at about $7.5 million -- $7.5 billion in '19. We anticipate that to be somewhat flat in the next couple of years, notwithstanding any stimulus packages. We see the DOE liability, as been published by DOE, at just below $500 billion. About 377 of that -- $377 billion is directly associated with the liability for the environmental management program. And those are defined in GAO reports in several times. Of that $377 billion, about $300 billion of that is associated with the Hanford project and Hanford right outside the tri-cities in Washington State, and we'll talk more about that in a second. On Slide 8, just kind of give you an overview of the sustainability in a little more detail. DOE has about 1,600 excess facilities. That's a terminology used for facilities that are no longer needed. Once they get to that status, they are transitioned over to the EM program, if they're not there already. And EM takes that liability and implements the cleanup for those facilities. Right now, it's estimated that they -- that 1,600 facilities have a price tag of about $12 billion for removing, not including costs associated with waste disposal. The roughly 15% of those excess facilities are designated as high-risk facilities. In other words, they have very high contamination or specific challenges associated with them due to the contamination. So in other words, that 15% of those -- of the 1,600 facilities are high risk, about 88% of that is the cleanup cost. So basically, the most contaminated highest risk facilities are going to cost more. And those are still outliers that have to come down. They're primarily at Savannah River; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. I think the important note on Slide 8 is the bottom box there, which basically says that since 2011, EM's liability grew by $214 billion from $163 billion to $377 billion, which is defined in the 2019 GAO report. And the thing that's important about that is that -- the concept is that even though DOE is spending about $7.5 billion a year on their cleanup program, the liability is still increasing. And that's because new facilities continue to be transitioned over to EM and the cost for their existing projects continues to rise. That underscores the sustainability of this market, the continued growth of this as a career path. For all of those on the phone that have kids wondering where to go in their careers, they'll be cleaning up the environmental program at DOE for the next 100 years at least. So there's a very sustainable market, very ripe for technology, very ripe for investment in regards to finding new ways to do things cheaper and faster. And that's where we come in, and that's what our market is. So on Slide 9, we have a few photos of each of our 4 facilities. One at North -- what we call Perma-Fix Northwest, which is the Richland, Washington site. That's our flagship facility, a very mature facility, very large. Has a lot of opportunities for growth and use of these existing facilities for new technology. The second is the DSSI facility in Kingston, Tennessee, just outside of Oak Ridge. In addition to that, we have the Florida facility in Gainesville. And our newest facility that we've added just this past year is what we call the EWOC facility in Oak Ridge. That's the waste -- Environmental Waste Operations Center, the EWOC, and that's been brought on board to provide services for dismantlement of large components. And also has a rail spur, which allows us to do transloading for disposal out West. Slide 10 describes the general barriers to entry, which puts us in a market that has very few competitors and very difficult to get into, primarily limited to the first bullet, which is the permitting side of the house. It's very difficult to get the permits to build the facilities that we have and to locate them. With the NRC, the EPA and state regulators all involved, it's a very onerous task to generate or develop a new facility or the technologies for those facilities. But we've made those investments, and they've been made for quite some time. We have very good relationships with each one of those regulators. It allows us to expand and continue to develop new technologies that can provide value to our clients. We have over 40 patents for chemical treatment processes, which also set us apart. And lastly, we have agreements with large other companies that have technologies that we may not have that we can deploy those technologies at our facility that have permits. An example of that is the GeoMelt facility -- or technology, which we've just recently deployed at our Richland facility and there's a photo there on Slide 10 of that technology that we've done with Veolia Nuclear Services Corporation (sic) [ Veolia Nuclear Solutions ]. We are in the process of constantly expanding our waste treatment capabilities at each of our facilities. Slide 11 kind of gives a general overview of that, particularly the waste -- tank waste treatment program at Hanford, and I'll talk about this a little bit later. What used to be called TBI, we're now just generally calling the low waste off-site treatment program for treatment of tank waste. And we continue to work with DOE on this front. And we also have the EWOC, which I just mentioned, there's a few photos there of the EWOC facilities. An aerial shot as well as a shot inside our main process building, which we will be processing equipment in upon award of a couple of contracts that are coming up. We've expanded the DSSI Kingston plant through some investment of capital dollars for building larger storage facilities, so we can move waste out of our process buildings into storage as well as moving our laboratory and some other activities, which will allow us to expand our current waste treatment plant to accept and treat more mercury and sodium, which are 2 waste streams that are problems at the local Oak Ridge facilities. And as I mentioned, we are still moving forward with our Veolia project, which is waiting for final approval from the regulators to start back up, and that's called the GeoMelt system. Slide 12 highlights our programs associated with nuclear services. That's the projects that are in the field. There's a few photos of some recent projects we're working on at Seattle as well as in Canada. This basically includes doing full-service remediation for radiological-contaminated facilities and soils. That includes the characterization, removal and demolition and then all the waste management that goes along with that. Where our real strengths are -- for Services, again, is in the health physics discipline, where we have 6 certified health physicists, which are very tough to find. And these health physicists are strong leaders within our company. And then we have about 40 or 50 radiological control technicians and many other technicians associated with the decontamination and demolition. In regards to expansion of nuclear services, we continue to develop new technologies that set us apart. Slide 13 has a few photos and descriptions of these different technologies. The first and the one we're most excited about is our new soil sorting technology. We've talked about this on a few quarterly calls over the past few years. It took us a while to win one of these projects that we have. And our soil sorter has been fabricated, developed and deployed for the Navy in San Diego. This has required some real creative engineering and software development, which has -- allows our system to sort clean soil from contaminated soil. And what that does is when you put the soil in our hopper, it goes on a conveyor belt, it has a gated system that allows the client to not have to dispose of clean soil that might have been remediated with contaminated soil. And this application we have in place now is supporting some dredging operations in San Diego that is finding small parts that have fallen into the bay over the years, and our soil sorting system is finding these parts, segregating them so that the Navy doesn't have to dispose of all the soil as contaminated and pay all the extra money associated with that disposal. Each one of these systems, which we have our first one going now, should generate between $5 million and $7 million a year in revenue with good strong margins. They're designed to run at about 200 tons an hour. That's pretty fast and is right now currently keeping up with the dredging operations at about 800 yards a day at this point. We also developed a new system for scanning and characterizing large fields and facilities. Slide 13 includes a map of this, a result of one of those scans, where we put the detection equipment on the back of an ATV and run over large areas to map those out so that a client can see exactly where the contaminated soil is at their facility. And lastly, we've also developed some new technology associated with the characterization of facilities, which are very similar to the iScan approach but for inside buildings and doing contamination detection along with the GPS unit so that we can map out where the contamination is in the facility. Slide 14, we kind of talk a little bit about growth and where we are. We did develop a backlog this year just after Q1 of about $55 million in Services backlog, which is going to take us through the rest of this year into the first quarter of next year as well as we've got several new waste streams that we're looking at as well is going to support our expansion of our waste treatment plants. We're constantly looking for new waste streams that need attention within the industry and what it takes for us to be able to provide value to these clients for treatment technologies that would allow them to save money over direct disposal or that may not be even qualified for direct disposal. So that's going very well. We have a good team of sales and marketing folks that are reaching out and finding those in a proactive basis. On the nuclear services side, we're expanding on several new fronts with -- we've had just 10 new clients this quarter, which demonstrates our -- the success of our BD program and positioning ourselves for some of the upcoming larger procurements within the Department of Energy and the DoD, and I'll talk about that more in a second. At the same time, we're also broadening our markets to the commercial and oil and gas side of the house. We have not been successful necessarily in recent years in the commercial industry because we haven't put the investment in the marketing and business development initiatives to break into the commercial side. That will be an emphasis this year, it has been for the last 2 quarters to find or develop a larger market share of the waste generated from the power and oil and gas industry. So Slide 15 addresses where we are with COVID. COVID, obviously, had a big impact on our industry. It shut down most of the Department of Energy sites -- all the Department of Energy sites, including administrative facilities as well as well as most of the DoD projects. We've been very successful in sustaining our business through this period. That began with implementing a very comprehensive safety program for our employees. We took that very seriously. Fortunate that our company is very sensitive and well trained in working around hazardous materials that has allowed us to make some adjustments that other companies may not have been able to make relative to wearing PPE and how that all works and the procedures that goes along with that. So far, we've only -- we've had no positive tests for employees for COVID through Q2. We did in Q3, and that person has been quarantined and has recovered with no other contaminations. Our treatment plants have remained open. And our backlog, while it has somewhat ceased in receipt of waste, we've been able to work through our backlog in Q2 and to keep things moving with the company. On the project side, we did a lot of work from home, and most of these projects have been redeployed. And we'll talk about that more in a few minutes. But we did receive a PPP loan of just over $5 million, and that's been just about spent already to support labor costs and utilities for the past 12 weeks. That loan did directly allow us to not lay off employees. Some of our projects that had layoffs associated with them, we were able to keep our staff on. And the value of that was that these are highly trained employees that we've made great investments in. We want to keep every one of them on, and it saved about 100 staff that otherwise would have been laid off during this period. Most of this 100 staff are already back on projects now. And this loan also was able to keep some our facilities from having to reduce staff as well. So the PPP was very important to us. Slide 16 generally shows a model of the Services and Treatment Segment profitability and how gross profit differs between the 2 segments. As you can see on the left, the Treatment Segment has a very flat fixed based -- fixed cost overall. In other words, our plants don't change that much. We keep them staffed, pretty much consistent with our plan for the year. We do see some variable costs associated with disposal and materials. But overall, the more we get in, the more that our margin goes up. And you can see there the linear approach associated with gross profit increases. On the Services Segment, we see a little different model because most of our costs are variable, specifically associated with labor and increasing labor costs. As we grow, as we win projects, we hire people, our margins are much lower, but have much more of a market base. In other words, there's a lot more work we can win when we integrate the strengths from the waste management side and health physics side, and we can provide a greater value to our clients. Moving on to Slide 17. Just what happened in the last 12 months? Well as most of you know from our press releases and our first quarter numbers, we did have a great growth over the last year with a 48% increase in revenue, that's between -- from '18 to '19 with an adjusted EBITDA of about 162% growth as well. So we had a great year. We're finally starting to see the payoff of our business development programs. We also had a lot of other initiatives that happened through that period as well number one being the closure of our M&EC facility. For those of you who have slides, on Slide 17, you can see a photo of the inside of one of those buildings that we had to decontaminate so we could get out of there and terminate our permits. We've also hired a lot of key industry leaders. With the growth also comes the opportunity to bring on strong leadership talent. And that's happened through this year with dramatic growth in staffing of about 20% to 25% just in the past 3 or 4 quarters. We've gone through about 3 years of cost-cutting initiatives and restructuring. We had a complete reorganization. We streamlined our consultant -- the consultants that we've had on board as well as other nonlabor expenses associated with facilities and equipment. So that has paid off with a good year, and we're poised very well for the coming year. Recent wins, we've had a couple of good press releases recently that have announced some wins, including one at Lawrence Berkeley and at -- with Jacobs for the DD&R, I'll talk about that in a second. But we've also increased a great backlog -- or developed a great backlog of several hundred million dollars of projects that have been -- proposed have been submitted and others that are waiting to come out over the next 18 months that give us a lot of confidence that we'll continue to see the growth that we've been seeing based on our competitiveness on these facilities. With the EWOC facility, we've already got 6 or 7 very strong proposals submitted. We have not generated any revenue at EWOC yet, but we do anticipate once the DOE facilities come back into gear that we'll be winning a few of those procurements for EWOC. On the services side, in addition to that, we're continuing to see growth, both on the DoD side with the soil sorter, which has gotten great reviews by our clients with the Navy, and they're -- have been demonstrating to other clients for growth that are supporting us in growth. And we're also seeing expansion of our work in Canada as well as several of our other projects along the way. Slide 19. Our positive outlook, we continue to see additional growth in regards to some of the DOE contracts. We've been successful in getting on teams, as you saw from the one press release just, I believe, it was Monday for the nationwide DD&R. That's a $3 billion contract over 10 years that we're teaming with Jacobs on, that there was 9 awards to, so we will be bidding on task orders as they come out from DOE on that. That's very timely in light of the potential stimulus packages that we've heard about that are going through Congress that would use this contract vehicle for new tasks within the DOE in the near future. We're also -- just kind of point out, I get this question a lot. Although our Services work, about 80% of our work that we do in Services is T&M work and cost reimbursable, less than 5% is fixed price. So that represents the fact that it's not terribly high-risk work in regards to financial impacts if something goes wrong. And all of the fixed price work is fixed unit rate, which is also one step back off of a fixed-price project. So lower risk in regards to the financial risk for performance. We also continued a lot of emphasis on teaming. Some of the big DOE contracts coming out, we're hoping to be on teams for each one of those and have spent a lot of time and energy doing presentations with some of the bigger companies that will be priming those to ensure that we have a play when those are out. I get a lot of questions in regards to how things are going at Hanford for the old TBI project, and Slide 20 kind of summarizes that. As most of you know, we were not successful initially with the award of the tank closure contract. And that is under protest right now, I can't talk much about that project other than that we were teaming with Jacobs. It was a very strong team, and we're still very optimistic that whoever wins that work, that our technology for treatment of tank waste will be the premier technology. It's the only one that's available in the near term for treating off-site or on-site, and we're working with DOE to continue to demonstrate that technology through what they're calling a low level waste off-site treatment program. We're anticipating that to continue to move forward for DOE to extract about 2,000 gallons out of one of the tanks within the next 9 months and ship that over to our facility at Perma-Fix Northwest for treatment, hopefully, in Q1 of next year. Our first quarter financials, as we've reported a few months ago, also saw good growth over last year, as depicted on Slide 21, with over 100% increase in revenue to $24.9 million versus $11 million in the prior year, but a dramatic growth in the Services Segment of almost 800% to $15.3 million. Now obviously, we had a pretty bad quarter in Services the year before. So it's somewhat masked by that. But however, first quarter is typically a bad quarter for everybody in this business because things shut down over the winter, you can only do so much work outside. Continued strong growth and our performance based on the projects we had and the client relationships we had, they worked through those usually downtimes. The gross profit increased to $4.6 million for the first quarter of 2020 versus $2.5 million the year before. So double -- almost double gross profit as well and adjusted EBITDA of $1.9 million versus only $67,000 for the prior year. So a really strong first quarter. We're hoping for a good second quarter as well. We'll be announcing that in August, right? Yes. As far as the 2019 financials, most of you have seen these before, on Slide 22, we did see a good overall net revenue growth, again, about 50% increase. And a great increase in EBITDA as well on Slide 22. Again, Q1, on Slide 23 defines our EBITDA at $1.866 million versus $67,000 the prior year. And just an investment summary overall, 2020 remains on track for similar growth as last year. Believe it or not, even though Q2, we took a step back, we're still, with our backlog, confident that we'll meet a similar growth track that we had for 2019. Any stimulus that we receive from Department of Energy in regards to cleanup is not in our numbers. So that would be above our current backlog that's funded and in place. We have nearly insurmountable barriers to entry, so we don't expect our competition to grow much that we're -- find new players that aren't already there. We're continuing to see good profitability within our projects. All of our projects right now in the field are on track for their profitability with one exception, and it's improving. But all of them are making money overall. And we continue to view our assets as undervalued and irreplaceable in regards to our treatment plants. That brings us to our last slide, Slide 25. Right now, I think most of you know we're traded on NASDAQ as PESI. I saw earlier this morning that our stock was sitting around $7.10. So we're seeing some increased visibility with our stock and our market cap is increasing from that as well. That is all we had for this year. Now we will entertain questions that have been submitted through our virtual website. Mr. David Waldman will read those questions now. David?

All right. Thank you, Mark. And just to give everyone a heads-up, if we don't get to everyone's question due to time constraints, please be assured we'll get back to you following the shareholder meeting or you can contact Investor Relations anytime at (212) 671-1021. The first question, what are the objectives and vision for Perma-Fix for total fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2021 as well as 3 to 5 years hence?

Well, as I briefly stated in the presentation, we do anticipate a similar growth track as we have for the last year. Obviously, we don't provide forward guidance. So there is some speculation there. But we are confident based on our backlog that we will have a good year that will look like 2019. And we hope to get the $200 million level in the next 2 years, that's going to take an award of a large M&O contract team like we would have had with tank closure. But we do see a similar type of growth trajectory based on some of the things we're winning, some of the outstanding bids we're waiting to hear on and the general trend of the industry.

Thank you. Our next question, what is the status of the TBI initiative? My understanding is the President budget allows -- allots money to continue this initiative has just been actualized.

I don't believe the current budget proposal includes TBI. However, the $10 million that was funded for 2020 has not been spent and is anticipated to be spent and carried over. So the same objective as anticipated, DOE reminds us frequently, this is still an objective for them and that we anticipate this to move forward. It gets kind of complicated on these things. There's a certain amount of speculation associated with it because some of the TBI scope was included in the tank closure contract. But overall, we anticipate to move forward with receipt of the 2,000 gallons with that $10 million that was funded in '19 -- excuse me, in 2020.

Thank you. Along the same lines, what is the anticipated annual revenue to be derived from the Hanford legacy facility, actual and anticipated?

The Hanford legacy facility, I'm not sure what that is, what they're referring to there. Unless it's the overall tank farm. I don't have it as numbers with me as far as annual. I'm not really sure what -- how to answer that.

Okay. We'll continue. And I would -- if anyone has follow-up questions, feel free to submit those through the portal. The next question, what is the delay about vis-à-vis the GeoMelt activity? Are there plans to add more equipment in other facilities?

Okay. I'm sorry, I'm losing track here.

Yes. Let me read the question.

Just a second, Dave, I've got it here online. Okay. It was -- okay. GeoMelt. Right now, GeoMelt has a very good backlog of waste waiting to come to it from Idaho and from other facilities, including Hanford facility. We are in the -- the way it has worked was we worked with the state regulators, our guys that run our facility at Perma-Fix Northwest, specifically Richard Grondin, and he has a very strong relationship with the regulators. We're putting together -- we put together a permit, which is generated in support of -- supported by a treatability study. What we've run in the last 2 years is a treatability study of the GeoMelt, where we've treated a certain portion of these types of waste. That's done and once you're done doing that treatment, and you put that performance data into a permit application and submit that to the state. And the state approves your treatment technology based on the performance of your treatment technology for that waste stream. That's all been done. We're waiting to hear back from the state. We're hoping to hear back in Q1 -- Q4, Q1, 6 months from now. And once that occurs, we have a very high confidence that it will, then we'll be able to start receiving some of that backlog from Idaho and Hanford through next year.

Great. Thank you. Our next question is how many Perma-Sort systems are planned to be created, assuming there is one in action presently?

Right now, we envision to have 4 systems in the next 18 months. We are starting to develop and order parts for the second system, which we have a client for, and we'll continue that about every 2 quarters to do another one as long as the market supports it. And we are including the soil sorter system on other procurements that would also provide a kind of additional backlog on top of that. But to answer the question, about 4 systems at this point.

Great. Thank you. Our next question, regarding the 10 new clients this quarter in the service sector, how much revenue do these clients represent?

Okay. It's a good question. We -- I can't get into revenue for these clients overall because most of these -- I think all of them are commercial. Most of these are small clients, though, for consulting services. And I would say, not necessarily material overall, so a total of maybe several million dollars for the year. But what this does represent in these new clients is the opportunities for growth and to prove performance and applying new technologies. So while they may not move the needle on revenue, they do certainly offer opportunities for growth in the near future.

Thank you. Our next question is when do you test for COVID? Are there regular tests or only when symptoms are manifested?

Yes. I'd rather not get into our safety program for COVID at this point, but we do have a CDC-based safety plan that we follow very strictly. And we have a team of safety professionals that focus on this daily. It is their job to implement this plan, and we follow the CDC guidelines completely.

Great. Thank you. Our next question, do you envision, and the fact you have utilized the government loan to maintain staffing, that you'll be able to maintain staff from organic revenue in the absence of the loan?

We do. The loan had allowed us to not reduce our staff and the performance that we announced in August, you will see, will be outside of the impacts of that loan. In other words, it does not assume forgiveness. So I think when we publish our results performance for Q2 that folks will see that we performed very well, irrespective of the PPP.

Great. Thank you. Our next question, at what revenue level do the economies of scales really hit vis-à-vis the service business -- hit the P&L via the -- vis-à-vis the service business?

Yes. It's really -- that's a very difficult question to answer. The larger you get, obviously, your infrastructure does not have to be copied for all of it, but it's not necessarily a linear scale. So I'm afraid I can't answer that at this point.

Okay. Thanks. So our next question, on the $3 billion award with Jacobs, understanding that you have to bid to gain work, what is your anticipation of success in bidding? And what are your advantages?

Yes. Jacobs is a very strong team in that they're with CH2M Hill acquisition a few years ago, and Jacobs' engineering capabilities, they have a very well-rounded capability base. We have lots of contracts with them. I think the last time I counted, 12 subcontracts with them. So great personal relationships. They're located in Oak Ridge. And we are bringing technologies to them as well as experience with some of the clients that will have projects coming out. And with those advantages that we feel like we'll be certainly in the top 2 or 3 teams that are bidding on every one of those task orders.

Great. Thank you. And our final question, as we lost the tank closure, the question with regard to Hanford is what is the anticipated subcontract business anticipated from Hanford beyond TBI?

Well, I think that -- I don't want to be quoted, but I think the subcontract goal for the winning team is about 50%. I can't remember exactly what the RFP said or contracts said. But it has a very large subcontracting goal. And they'll have a small business on their team that will get some of that. But overall, with a subcontract goal, which was largely small business, which we still are, there'll be lots of opportunity for other work out there for remediation, for demolition, for waste management, waste treatment that they will get credit for going to Perma-Fix as a small business. And I can't really say what those opportunities look like now. But we do anticipate being a major player in the waste treatment side of the house as they start to remediate tanks and start pulling waste out of those tanks to start closing them and consolidating them. So we see ourselves as a very important component of DOE's mission for closing the tanks at Hanford.

Great. Thank you, Mark. That is the last question, concludes the questions that have been submitted. I'll now turn the meeting back over to the Chairman, Mr. Larry Shelton.

Thank you, David. There being no further questions, the inspector has now submitted the results of the votes taken during the meeting. Secretary will now please present a report concerning the votes.

Thank you, Larry. Presented either in person or by proxy are a total of 9,239,889 shares of the company's common stock entitled to vote or 76.1% of such shares outstanding on June 2, 2020. For proposal 1, election of the directors, I'd like to read the results. In total, there was 3,285,606 broker nonvotes. For Dr. Louis Centofanti, 5,434,058 shares for, 520,225 withheld; for Mr. Joseph T. Grumski, 5,490,843 shares for, 463,440 withheld; for the honorable Joe Reeder, 3,591,829 for votes, 2,362,454 withheld; for Mr. Larry Shelton, 5,033,773 votes for, 920,510 withheld; for the honorable Zach Wamp, 5,036,121 votes for, 918,162 votes against; and for Mr. Mark Zwecker, 5,093,338 shares for -- votes for, 860,945 withheld. For proposal #2, the approval of the first amendment to the company's 2017 stock option plan. The majority of the votes have been cast in favor of the approval of the first amendment to the company's 2017 stock option plan. For proposal #3, the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton, LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for the 2020 fiscal year, the majority of the votes have been cast in favor for the approval for the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton, LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for the 2020 fiscal year. And for proposal #4, the approval, on an advisory basis, the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers. The majority of the votes have been cast in favor for the approval, on an advisory basis, the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers.

Thank you, Ben. I hereby declare each of the items voted upon duly approved by the stockholders. The Board of Directors is appreciative of the loyalty and support of our stockholders. Being there are no other items of business, I will entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting.

I move.

Mr. Zwecker has motioned to adjourn and is seconded by Mr. Grumski. All in favor? [Voting]

Any opposed? [Voting]

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The meeting is adjourned.