Ross Taylor: Okay. You talked about Europe, you talked about first — what you see going on, what the potential is out of Germany? I think they’ve shut down or will have shut down all their new capacity, when I would think that that would might be the biggest market available in Germany or in Europe or Central Europe. Can you just — am I right in that read? And when we look at the European or Central European opportunity, are these where you’re going to have a unique JV in each country? Either is there someone in Europe, like the leading player in this, and your work with them to pursue these opportunities? How does much again like your go-to-market approach in Europe?
Mark Duff: Yeah. We’re working, in fact, at the conferences we can finish working with several different entities in Europe that are here participated in the conference. There isn’t a central organization. And you’re correct, Germany is pretty much the largest near-term market as their decommissioning 17 reactors that are all in different phases of decommissioning. And they all are generating waste as they decommission as well as having significant volumes of waste in storage. And Germany is building a very large long-term storage facility and a former iron mine in Germany that has a very specific acceptance criteria that they have to meet to get their waste into that facility. So what we’re offering two different clients in Germany is the ability to treat that waste, reduce the volume, i.e., reducing the storage footprint they need to get it in, and making it stable to meet that criteria.
So we’re in the process of working where there is several organizations involved and there’s numerous waste streams that we wouldn’t deal with. And there’s a lot that we would. So we’re working through that right now. In regard to JV, that be more like partnerships and agreements and unlike the Westinghouse situation, which is a JV. But these are all part of the offering we have through Westinghouse and through other organizations as well, depending on what the waste stream looks like. And it’s really kind of unfolding at this point, but all pointing towards early ’25 to get rolling.
Ross Taylor: Okay. And just real quick one last. Just going back over and looking at DFLAW, what’s the correlation between revenues for you and operations for the vitrification plant? How quickly do you start to see cash flow from that once they start to get it up? Are they currently operating at a low level and are you seeing some process or some materials come through that? And as it works, I think they have two melters. So I thought would be they start one melter and then they start the second melter at a point after that. Is that how it’s going to play?
Mark Duff: Yeah, they’re going to have the cold commissioning right now, which is — as opposed to hot commissioning. Hot commissioning will use some radioactive surrogates to begin to run through the system. Right now, just kind of give you schedule, schedule is not defined very well by DOE. They have a very hard and fast agreement. It’s really well defined to have the plant operational — fully operational — I should now take it back. Operational, which means they have to be vitrifying waste by August of ’25. DOE intends to beat that. They’ve said that publicly numerous times, and that — at that point in time, it will be generating depending on how many melters are going way to 8,000 yards, I mentioned. However, we fully intend that as they go through hot commissioning and start adding radioactive surrogates to the class that they’ll generate waste on that as well.
So we anticipate that to begin earlier in ’25 as they do the demonstration of the technology, and the whole process overall, it will start generating smaller amounts of waste in the scheme of things. But you’re right. We see a ramping up through the year. And by the end of ’25, certainly we would expect both melters would be operating and be at the annualized rate of the , which is the 8,000 yards — actually, cubic meters.
Ross Taylor: Okay. So by the end of ’25, you would think you’d be at a run rate. There was some talk, I believe, in the Seattle publication that you might see something — they might see something come out of that in late ’24. Is that just a pipe dream?
Mark Duff: I did see that too. And I know where it’s getting these numbers from. But it’s very difficult. DOE is intentionally avoids committing these things because it’s like investing. If you gave the comment, you can be held accountable. You can hope for your performance. But the bottom line is that they’re working very well. They’re very excited about meeting the milestones as they are meeting with the melters. They’re actually working as anticipated. But to go before they get to full operations as it goes through a lot of readiness reviews like any nuclear plant starting up, which takes a lot of effort and is very difficult. Having said that, Ross, I really believe that there are — anything before the first quarter of ’25 would be shocking to me. But they might be able to get started. It’s hard to say.
Ross Taylor: Okay, and I’ll leave with, once again, congratulations and the PFAS opportunity, out of the blue, but really exciting. And just generally, as you said, it looks like we’re setting up for a really not only exciting, but quite profitable ’25. So the road kind of longer than people hoped for, but it looks like you’re well on your way on it. Thank you.
