Army considers nerve agent options after DuPont exits
plan
By RICK CALLAHAN
The Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS - The Army said it's
"back to square
one" in determining what will become of some 2 million gallons of
wastewater from a nerve agent's destruction since DuPont Co. has
abandoned the project.
Army spokesman Greg Mahall said Thursday
that military officials are now studying several methods for disposing
the waste at the same western Indiana complex where the deadly Cold
War-era VX nerve agent is being destroyed.
Before DuPont's
announcement, the Army had been pressing to ship the wastewater, called
hydrolysate, from the Newport Chemical Depot about 30 miles north of
Terre Haute, to an out-of-state location for secondary treatment and
disposal.
Mahall said the Army was disappointed by DuPont's Jan.
5 decision to drop out of a plan to ship the wastewater from Newport to
the company's Deepwater, N.J., plant for disposal.
"We're back
to square one and we've returned to reviewing all the options
available. That includes disposal either on or off site," said Mahall,
who works at the Army's Chemical Materials Agency at Aberdeen Proving
Grounds
He said the Army is now examining the feasibility of
four possible methods for destroying the hydrolysate at Newport. Each
approach would require building a treatment facility at the Newport
complex, something that would take a few years.
Newport
spokeswoman Terry Arthur said it costs about $350,000 a day to run the
complex, which include the agent disposal facility and an adjacent VX
storage bunker.
Under an international treaty, the U.S. faces an April 2012 deadline to
destroy its chemical weapons stockpile.
DuPont
is the second company that had expressed an interest in the VX
hydrolysate disposal project, only to lose out largely because of
strong public opposition.
Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc.
of Dayton, Ohio, was dropped from the project in 2003 after residents
there complained about the plans to dump the treated waste in the
city's sewer system.
DuPont officials said they dropped out
because they expected a contentious regulatory battle for the project
amid strong public opposition and court challenges in New Jersey and
Delaware.
The Army produced its entire supply of VX - a single droplet of which
can kill a human in minutes - at Newport during the 1960s.
In
May 2005, Army contractor Parsons Technology Inc. began destroying
Newport's stockpile of about 250,000 gallons of VX by neutralizing the
agent in chemical reactors.
To date, just more than 40 percent
of the stockpile has been destroyed, producing 613,000 gallons of
hydrolysate, said Jeff Brubaker, the Army's on-site manager at Newport.
He
said the effort will produce a projected 1.8 million gallons of
hydrolysate by the time the last of the stockpile is destroyed,
sometime in the summer of 2008.
Tom Linson, branch chief of the
office of land quality for the Indiana Department of Environmental
Management, said the Army has a state permit to store up to about 2.4
million gallons of hydrolysate on site in large metal storage
containers.
"They keep adding space as they need it," he said.
"Of course they were banking on being able to ship that hydrolysate out
at some point in time. Now, there's really no clear path forward for
them."
The alternate treatment methods being considered by the
Army include incineration, which local activists have strongly opposed,
and a high-pressure treatment process that yields a solid that can be
buried in a landfill, Mahall said. The two other methods are a chemical
oxidation process and a technique called wet-air oxidation.
He
said the Army, however, has not ruled out the possibility of shipping
the waste out of state to some other company for final treatment and
disposal.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Army had
planned to both neutralize Newport's VX then treat and dispose of its
resulting waste on site. After the attacks, the military said it wanted
to ship the waste off site for disposal to speed up the process.
