INDIANAPOLIS - The Newport Chemical Depot, where an Army contractor recently finished the first year of a project to destroy a deadly nerve agent, is on track to become the nation's only active chemical weapons disposal site to meet a 2012 treaty deadline.
The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency said the western Indiana complex will destroy its stockpile of VX nerve agent and dispose of the resulting waste by April 2012.
That timeline includes the possibility that the Army will fail in its plans to ship the waste to a DuPont Co. plant in New Jersey for disposal and must instead dispose of it onsite.
"This has a lot of risk built into it and we're taking into account the possibility of treating it onsite," said Gregory Mahall, a spokesman for the Chemical Materials Agency.
The agency, based at Maryland's Aberdeen Providing Ground, is in charge of storing and disposing of the nation's chemical weapon stockpiles under the terms of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention signed by about 150 nations.
The agency's director, Michael A. Parker, announced Tuesday that while Newport will meet the treaty's April 2012 deadline, chemical weapons storage sites in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah are expected to miss it by years.
Army contractor Parsons Technology Inc. began neutralizing Newport's more than 250,000 gallons of VX - a single droplet of which can kill a human in minutes - in May 2005.
With nearly 20 percent of that stockpile destroyed to date, Parsons is projected to finish that chemical neutralization project by late 2007, said Terry Arthur, a depot spokeswoman.
The Army wants to ship an estimated 4 million of gallons of a caustic wastewater called hydrolysate produced by the VX destruction to DuPont's Deepwater, N.J., plant for treatment and eventual discharge into the Delaware River.
Last month, activists from six states repeated their call for the Army to drop those plans and instead treat the hydrolysate onsite at Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute.
Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group in Berea, Ky., said the Army could have more quickly completed the hydrolysate disposal required under the international treaty if it had stuck to its original plans.
That plan would have subjected the hydrolysate onsite to a high-pressure treatment process that yields a solid which can be buried in a landfill.
"If they had followed the original plan they would have been able to complete the secondary treatment process onsite probably well ahead of the treaty deadline," Williams said.
As of May 3, the U.S. had destroyed about 36 percent of its declared inventory of 31,500 tons of chemical agents.
The nation's seven remaining chemical weapons depots contain a variety of Cold War-era chemical and nerve agents, including VX, sarin, mustard and lewisite, some of it in munitions.
Mahall said several factors have pushed back efforts to destroy those agents beyond the April 2012 deadline. Those include delays in obtaining environmental permits, lower than projected agent destruction rates and work stoppages caused by mechanical problems.
He said the revised schedule "reflects much more operational expertise."
"The key thing has always been safety. We're not going to sacrifice safety for cost or schedule," Mahall said.
The agency's conservative estimates for the projects currently under way in five states call for Utah's Deseret Chemical Depot and Arkansas' Pine Bluff Arsenal to be completed in 2015.
Alabama's Anniston Army Depot would finish work in 2016, followed by Oregon's Umatilla Chemical Depot in 2017.
Destruction of stockpiles at Colorado's Pueblo Chemical Depot and Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot have not begun. Stockpiles once housed at Johnston Atoll and Aberdeen Proving Ground have already been destroyed.