Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
June 29, 2003

PB Arsenal tests weapon furnace

BY KIM MCGUIRE

Posted on Sunday, June 29, 2003

Army contractors began feeding thousands of pounds of chemical solvents into the weapon incinerator at the Pine Bluff Arsenal on Saturday — the first real trial of the $650 million plant.

Military officials said it would take a few days before engineers could assess the incinerator’s performance, as tests were to continue over the weekend.

The tests were designed to gauge whether the incinerator can safely destroy chemicalweapon agents when the Army begins burning the arsenal’s World War II-era stockpile sometime next year.

More than 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons are stored in Pine Bluff. The stockpile includes 90,231 M55 rock- ets filled with the nerve agent sarin, 19,582 rockets containing VX nerve agent, 9,378 VX-filled mines, 26 M56 rocket warheads containing VX, and 3,698 1-ton containers filled with mustard gas, a blister agent.

The chemical weapons are scheduled to be destroyed by 2010.

While clearly not as dangerous as the chemical agents stored at the arsenal, the solvents used in Saturday’s tests are more difficult to destroy, state environmental regulators say. "We’ve got to be sure they’ve got material that is tougher to destroy than the actual agent," said Derick Warrick, chief of the state Department of Environmental Quality’s chemical demilitarization unit. "For example, if you know you can kick a 50-yard field goal, then you’re going to be able to kick a 30-yard field goal."

The tests are a major milestone in the history of the Pine Bluff Arsenal, one of three military installations in the nation gearing up to burn chemical weapons. An incinerator in Tooele, Utah, is already burning weapons.

Nationally, environmental groups, the military and community activists have debated for years whether chemical weapons can be safely burned.

Opponents fear burning could release harmful, even deadly chemical clouds, while supporters argue it is far more dangerous to store the aging weapons.

The Army hired the Washington Demilitarization Co. to construct, operate and close the Pine Bluff incinerator. By the time the contractors finish destroying chemical weapons there, the cost of the project is expected to reach $1.7 billion.

In November, the company finished construction of the incinerator.

Since then, contractors have been testing the equipment — a process Army officials call "shakedown" that culminated with the first round of tests Saturday.

This weekend’s tests as well as those scheduled in the future will be monitored by the Department of Environmental Quality, the state agency responsible for ensuring the arsenal complies with its environmental permits.

On Saturday, contractors poured a soup of chemical solvents used in dyes, herbicides and metal degreasers inside the liquid incinerator, one of three major furnaces in the Chemical Agent Disposal facility.

To gauge the efficiency of the liquid incinerator, the Army needs three successive runs. Each run is expected to last four hours.

More than 1,000 pounds of the solvent soup were burned each hour at temperatures that reached 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. "We’re going to be checking it all out, making sure everything works and there are no glitches, of course," Chris West, spokesman for Washington Demilitarization said last week. "If there are, the clock stops and we start assessing what went wrong."

If the incinerator fails any component of the tests, the Army will be allowed to retry the part that failed. These tests often are called "mini-burns."

The Army’s schedule calls for testing the other two major components of the incinerator — the deactivation furnace and the metal parts furnace — in September and January.

If all goes as planned, the weapon destruction would begin next April.

Several other roadblocks, however, could delay the burns.

The Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Kentucky-based organization opposed to incineration, has two legal challenges pending against the Army.

The first challenges the environmental permits the state has issued to the Army. That appeal, filed in 1999, is pending before the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Last March the group also filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D. C., seeking an injunction prohibiting the Army from incinerating any more weapons.

The group plans even more legal maneuvers to stop weapons incineration, but it hasn’t decided whether Pine Bluff will be targeted, said Craig Williams, executive director of the group. "Although our primary focus in the D. C. case is Alabama, we’re not sure if we file an injunction whether we’re going to capture all of the sites, or just Anniston," he said.

Recently, the Army notified Congress that it is ready to begin destroying chemical munitions in Anniston, Ala. The Alabama depot would become the third military installation incinerating weapons. The other is undergoing testing in Oregon.

The military completed a burn three years ago at the Johnson Atoll about 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, and weapons are being incinerated at the Deseret Depot in Tooele. The Utah installation has been fraught with problems, even suspending operations for eight months after a worker was accidentally exposed to sarin, which attacks the central nervous system.

The United States is supposed to destroy much of its chemicalweapon reserves by 2007, a deadline set by the International Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997. Army officials, however, expect the deadline will be pushed back to 2012.