WHITE HALL, Ark. -- Pine Bluff Arsenal
officials say they have learned from previous disposal programs how to incinerate
chemical weapons safely and efficiently.
And those other programs also affirmed their belief that burning the weapons
is the best option.
"The risk of storing munitions is far greater than destroying them," said
Raini Wright, a spokesman for the arsenal's Chemical Disposal Facility.
Disposal operations will begin slowly with the processing of two M55 rockets
filled with GB nerve agent, also known as sarin.
The GB M55 rockets will be driven Monday from the arsenal's storage area
to the disposal facility Monday, a distance of 2 1/2 to 3 miles.
Wright said they will eventually ramp up to 30 rockets per hour. The arsenal
also plans to destroy land mines containing nerve agents and other containers
of two types of mustard agent.
"Once the weapons are into the disposal facility, the likelihood of an event
is minimal, but in storage there aren't the same safety features and there's
a higher potential for an agent migrating into the community unabated," said
Greg Mahall of the Army's Chemical Materials Agency.
The arsenal's storage facilities are igloos covered with earth that look
like fall-out shelters. Mahall said they are not well protected against earthquakes
or other natural events that could cause chemicals to leak into the atmosphere.
The incinerator facility, on the other hand, has state-of-the-art filtration
systems "that put a gas mask over the plant, if you will," Mahall said.
The Pine Bluff Arsenal stores 3,850 tons of chemical weapons, 12 percent
of the nation's stockpile. The United States and 65 other countries have
agreed in a treaty to destroy the weapons.
To ease community concerns and any potential for what arsenal officials call
"activism" against incineration, they point out that the disposal process
is well tested. By far the largest storage site is in Tooele, Utah, which
houses 44 percent of the national stockpile, and it began incineration in
1996. The Army started a trial burn program in 1990 at Johnston Atoll, an
island about 750 miles southwest of Honolulu, and later started a full incineration
program there, which is now complete.
There are five other sites waiting to start disposal operations, including
the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Ky. Umatilla, Ore., also holds 12
percent of the stockpile and will use incineration. A newer, non-burning technology
called neutralization will be used at some other sites with smaller stockpiles
and with non-stockpile weapons, which include small vials of chemicals.
Mahall said having the experience of Utah and Johnston Atoll has been invaluable.
"The original planners went in with some assumptions that proved to be false,"
Mahall said. "They expected these weapons to contain the same agent as when
they were created in the 1950s or 1960s. But in many cases we found they had
degraded in storage and gotten worse. We found crystalization and even gelled
agent.
"Still, the arsenal says it is prepared to address questions and concerns
from local residents by holding public hearings, promising to update the
media on the disposal process, installing tone-alert radios and a state-of-alert
siren system and by having the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality
perform constant air-quality checks.
The Army is still undecided on whether it will transport chemical weapons
between the various disposal sites. Mahall said various alternatives are
still being considered and, once a report on the issue goes to Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it will be up to him.