Anniston Star
January 1, 2003

A Matter of Trust: How does it end? Imagine Anniston with no more stockpile

By Jason Landers
Star Staff Writer
01-01-2003

On a blood-soaked field near Ieper, Belgium, entrenched desperate men unleashed a monster that changed war.

Generals barked out the order and watched from a distance as a smothering fog enveloped weary soldiers.

Chemical weapons made their battlefield debut by littering the ground with bodies. They killed indiscriminately during World War I. At the whimsy of the wind, mustard gas, chlorine and phosgene choked the life from soldier, mother and child. Lifelong scars brand the ones who survived its blistering touch. When the war ended, the body count from the new weapons surpassed 90,000. The number maimed exceeded a million.

Weapons of mass destruction arrived in a century on fire with war, threats of war, and genocide. Proliferation followed, as did deadlier, more complex blends, called nerve agents.

The human equivalent of roach spray, nerve agents now go by names like sarin and VX, aging tons of which are stored here in Anniston. A fraction of a drop of either sends a healthy soldier to his grave.

All over the world, countries like Hitler's Germany, the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and United States filled millions of land mines, mortars, projectiles and rockets with the new liquid death. But the munitions saw more dust than action, as none were tested in battle. They rolled off assembly lines into sturdy concrete bunkers, where they slumbered from the end of World War I until Sadaam Hussein's rise to power. Between 1980 and 1992, the monster was unleashed again, this time on Iranians and Kurds.

Then, in 1993, the nations said enough is enough. Their leaders struck an unprecedented agreement called the Chemical Weapons Convention. For the first time in history, countries agreed to destroy an entire class of weapons of mass destruction. The monster's days on Earth were numbered, or so it seemed. Hussein is among a handful of leaders who have refused to sign.

As of 2002, a total of 174 countries have entered into the agreement. They plan on feeding the weapons to hungry furnaces, a process known as incineration, or neutralizing them with industrial chemicals, similar to the way baking soda neutralizes acid on a car battery.

If the peacemakers anticipated a smooth transition into demilitarization, they guessed wrong. Under the guise of protecting the environment, activists have contested incineration, though Army evidence demonstrates it is the quickest, arguably safest method for destroying the hundreds of thousands of threatening tons of nerve and blister agents.

With microscopic precision, the activists attack incineration on every front. They charge the demilitarization facilities dirty the air, hurt workers and endanger public health.

The ensuing clash of wills has threatened the rate at which the Army moves forward in destroying the 40-year-old chemical weapons stored at places like Anniston; Umatilla, Ore.; and Pine Bluff, Ark.

Around here, tempers on the subject don't just run hot. They boil.

An emotive argument

"I think that hazardous waste incineration is not a safe way to dispose of hazardous wastes," said Calhoun County Commissioner Robert Downing, a lead opponent of the Army's plans to burn the weapons. "I don't know the answer to the hazardous waste disposal. I know there must be an answer, but incineration isn't it."

Downing is a small-business owner who ran for office because he wanted to make a difference in his hometown. He is passionate about the environment and handed out seedlings of the endangered Mountain Longleaf Pine during his last campaign. Anniston, he says, has been bombarded by too much pollution - be it from foundries or PCBs. A hazardous waste incinerator, he says, is the last thing the community needs.

United under the umbrella of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, or CWWG, the activists criticize and dismiss as prejudiced any "pro-incineration" study the Army, The National Academies or any peer-reviewed research body might offer.

"You are just another rubber stamper for the incinerator," an Anniston Star answering machine recorded an irate activist as saying. The caller was responding to a story that ran in

The Star Dec. 5. "What a sorry piece of crap it was." An initial story reported that a scientific panel had endorsed incineration. The Dec. 5 story reported that allegations of bias against that panel were unfounded.

The debate the activists have revived is one the Army itself set out to resolve in the 1970s at a laboratory in the Utah desert and at the foot of the Rockies in Colorado.
Named Project Eagle, the experiment settled the argument as far as the Army was concerned. It compared the results of neutralization with incineration and determined incineration to be the clear winner.

Tasked only with the mission of choosing the best technology available, the Army failed to factor in the political equation.

Incineration, like the nerve and blister agents it effectively destroys, evokes strong emotions.
"There's a practical level to this, and there's an emotional level," a staffer for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in 1994. He was explaining his boss's attempts at stopping an Army incinerator from operating in Tooele, Utah. "A lot of people react emotionally to incineration, and we have to be concerned with that."

Now the debate has reached regulatory and judicial realms. Federal judges in Alabama and Oregon soon could rule on a case where activists are seeking to delay startup of those incinerators. A favorable ruling would stall destruction in cities such as Anniston, where the Army haggled for seven years with state regulators over its billion-dollar facility's permit.

It is a nagging debate that threatens to derail the Army's destruction schedule.

Strip away the emotion, the protesters and the picket signs, and the issue boils down to trust.
Trust the Army's repeated studies and peer-reviewed research by the nation's leading scientists, or dismiss that evidence and put your trust in an alternative.

Chemical Weapons Working Group argues neutralization provides that alternative. Neutralization, they say, is the safer technology.

Project Eagle

The Army conducted its first neutralization tests with sarin at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver and at a facility called CAMDS in Utah. The testing ran from 1973 to 1976 and generated mixed reviews. It proved neutralization could partially destroy agent, but in many cases failed at destroying it completely or in the allotted time.

Weeks passed before neutralization destroyed some of the samples, suggesting the process was not fully mature for chemical weapons.

An informal Army report from 1984 entitled "A Summary History of Chemical Exposures During Demil Operations" and stamped "For Official Use Only" suggests unsafe working conditions plagued the neutralization tests. The document says the experiment accidentally exposed 90 (some military sources suggest 145) workers to sarin.

Nerve agent exposures occurred in all three years of neutralization testing - 32 in 1974, 97 in 1975, and 15 in 1976.

During the same three years, incineration tests resulted in six worker exposures, total. The summary history suggests it is an apples-to-oranges comparison, because the incinerator burned mustard agent, which is far less volatile than sarin and therefore easier to protect
against.

Two factors, the report concludes, contributed to the high sarin exposures: "First, common sense dictates that when demil operations are proceeding on a large scale, one's chances of exposure are at their greatest."

Second, and perhaps most important, the highly volatile sarin slipped through the M-3 rubber suits that workers relied on for protection. Those suits offered only a fraction of the protection today's space-age bubble suits provide.

The suit factor suggests that, regardless the destruction method, any worker risked sarin exposure when wearing the rubber suit. It also demonstrates that, regardless the destruction method, the work has its hazards.

Army policymakers gave the nod to incineration.

Incineration gave "a universal destruction method that would work with all the agents as well as the secondary waste streams," said Kevin Flamm, who heads the Alternative

Technologies and Approaches program for the branch of the Army that oversees demilitarization.

That program will oversee upcoming, and much-improved, pilot neutralization facilities at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., and Newport, Ind. But the Army maintains it doesn't outshine incineration in places like Anniston, where incinerators with new safety enhancements stand.

"The Army selected high-temperature incineration to do the job," a 1994 report by The Henry L. Stimson Center reads. "When compared with other alternatives available at the time this decision was made, incineration ranked highest for effective and safe disposal."
During the 1990s, the Army built two incinerators - one on the tiny Pacific Island of Johnston Atoll and the other at Tooele, Utah. When the Army chose burning in Utah, the fight got heated.

Determined not to repeat a neutralization failure, the Army moved forward with burning. Neutralization stayed alive, however, in theory and overseas experiments. Activists and politics resuscitated its viability at the nation's chemical weapons stores.

A July 1996 Army report correctly predicted the resurgence of neutralization.

"The study concludes that none of the (alternative technologies, including neutralization) are as technically mature as incineration," the report reads, "however, all have the potential to successfully destroy the stockpile with comparable safety, and with costs and schedules comparable to, or less than incineration." It added, "All (alternative technologies) have less permitting risk compared to incineration."

According to the report, public perception drove the permitting risk, and not environmental concerns. The negative perception came almost exclusively from the activists' distrust of smokestacks.

A year after the report, Congress mandated the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment, or ACWA, program and tasked it with finding alternative technologies for destroying chemical munitions.

The program eyed the Pueblo, Col., stockpile of mustard projectiles for its first project, one that remains in the design phase. Additionally, the Army is considering a recommendation by Under Secretary of Defense Pete Aldridge to incorporate a form of neutralization at the Blue Grass, Ky., stockpile. The stockpile holds a small number of mustard munitions, along with some nerve agent-filled projectiles and rockets.

For mustard projectiles, the neutralization technology is well understood. There are still lessons to be learned, ACWA officials said, about VX- and sarin-filled rockets. "Blue Grass presents a little bit of a tougher logistical problem as far as accessing because of the rockets," said Bill Pehlivanian, deputy manager of the program. The rockets were not designed for disassembly and must be cut. It is part of the reason, he says, why the final decision about Kentucky hasn't been made.

With alternative technologies on track for use in Indiana, Maryland, Colorado and likely Kentucky, the nation's eight demilitarization facilities are split equally between rival technologies.

"No emissions are good emissions"

An anthem of incineration foes, the quote is highlighted at www.cwwg.org just below the cartoon of a saddened child wearing a gas mask staring at a withered flower he holds. The message is clear. It stresses the "environmental devil" incineration is a dread far worse than delaying destruction of 2,200 tons of aging nerve agent until a "safer" alternative arrives.

Critics of incineration will not see past the smokestacks.

"Alternative technologies hold the promise of benefiting society in the future," Commissioner Downing said. "Incineration does not."

"Our position has always been that incinerating this material anywhere is foolhardy," said Craig Williams, director of CWWG.

No emissions are good emissions, the Working Group slogan says in condemnation of incineration. The Web site makes scant mention of the seven smokestacks that likely will crown the Colorado neutralization facility. By contrast, the incinerator in Anniston has three smokestacks.

"The exact number of stacks has not been determined," said Scott Susman, lead engineer for the proposed neutralization facility. "But there will be air emissions associated with that facility."

Nothing on the Chemical Weapons Working Group's Web site advertises emissions at a neutralization facility.

"I know there are stacks for the boilers and so forth," said Williams, who added it's what incinerators emit that his group opposes.

What Williams didn't know was that the stacks at the neutralization facility will emit higher levels of some of the most deadly compounds than incinerators will.

Army neutralization officials who oversee the Colorado project readily admit their pilot facility likely will emit more cancer-causing dioxins and furans than the incinerators in Anniston, Arkansas and Oregon. Still, the Colorado facility's emissions are projected to be low and safe - just not as low and as safe for these particular compounds.

"We have been up front with the activist community that we do in fact have those dioxins and furans," Pehlivanian said.

"I have not had that information passed on to me," Williams said during an interview.
Another point that goes unstressed is the relatively small amount of emissions that hazardous waste incinerators generate compared with other industries.
Anniston's chemical weapons incinerator is unparalleled in this region of the state. Regulators say its emissions are low. Extremely low.

"They are probably some of the lowest in the nation for industry," boasted Tim Garrett, who manages the Army's operation in Anniston.

Records from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, or ADEM, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency support the claim. The incinerator will produce fewer emissions than 14 of 18 regional industries in northeast Alabama in at least three of five major emissions categories.

National Cement Co. of Alabama in St. Clair County, Anniston Army Depot, Wellborn Cabinets Inc. in Ashland, Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Corp. in Wadley and Bowater Inc. in Talladega produce emissions higher than the allowable incinerator levels in four of the five categories.

The furnace at nearby Jacksonville State University is permitted to surpass the incinerator's regulated emission requirements by more than four times for particulate matter. It also is permitted to produce almost twice the carbon monoxide and about 20 times the volatile organic compounds.

"If JSU's heating plant emits toxic materials, it should be cleaned up," Williams said. "Just because one emits more than another is not a good thing." He said the comparison is not fair.

Regulators allow Alabama Power's coal-generated power plant in Gadsden to produce 22 times the particulate matter, six times the nitrogen dioxide, 18 times the carbon monoxide, 22 times the volatile organic compounds and 726 times the sulfur dioxide that Anniston's incinerator will be allowed.

Similarly, Alabama Power's Gaston plant in Shelby County is allowed to emit 384 times more particulate matter, 87 times more nitrogen dioxide, 331 times the carbon monoxide, 400 times the volatile organic compounds and 2,741 times the sulfur dioxide.

Neither Williams nor Downing had been informed about the comparative industries.

None of these facilities evoke nearly the frenzy a chemical weapons incinerator does. None are destroying a menace that has claimed more than 90,000 lives.

Safe, safer, safest what the experts say

To be sure, incineration has had its shortfalls. During 15 cumulative years of operations at Johnston Atoll and Tooele, a total of 40 chemical events occurred in which the potential existed for exposure, according to a recent study by the National Research Council, or NRC.

The report scrutinized seven of the potentially dangerous mishaps - two in great detail - and concluded incineration is feasible and safe at the Anniston, Arkansas and Oregon stockpiles.

Further, it recommended, "The destruction of aging chemical munitions should proceed as quickly as possible "

Previous NRC reports had reached similar conclusions, as did the 1994 Henry L. Stimson Center report funded by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation. It found the Army's Johnston Atoll incinerator "met or exceeded" federal pollution control standards in every category. That facility, a first-generation plant, did not have anything like the enhancements in place at the Anniston facility and its sister plants in Arkansas and Oregon.

After examining the scientific claims of incineration opponents, the Stimson Center responded.

"The opposition has probed virtually every aspect of the (incineration) program," the report said, "but the technical underpinnings of its accusations have not received the same degree of examination.

"Recent peer reviews of the science contained in some of the opposition's reports reveal it to be poor, biased, and lacking in the standards that normally discipline scientific research. In short, incineration opponents seem to be presenting a distorted picture of incineration "

No credible scientific study, including those supporting neutralization's possibilities, suggests the alternative is safer than incineration, according to the Army, The National Academies and neutralization technicians at the ACWA program.

"We've never claimed that one technology was safer than the other," said the Army's Flamm in a dismissal of the activists' assertions.

Flamm said the proposed neutralization programs he heads in Maryland and Kentucky are pilots that have never before been fully tested with all the parts working together. "Neutralization has not been employed at the same scale as incineration to destroy chemical weapons," he acknowledged.

Like Flamm, the Assessment's neutralization experts acknowledge that, while most components of their program performed well during research and development, aspects of it have been tested only on paper. "But we have a strong belief that they will work," Pehlivanian said.

Degrees of risk: workers, public, environment

What counts, Flamm says, is that "the relative risks between an incineration and neutralization plant are essentially the same."
Define essentially?

The explanation is elusive and explores varying degrees of risk. It includes those faced by workers, those common among communities surrounding a stockpile, and the projected environmental effects.

During operations at Johnston Atoll and Tooele, monitors detected only a few drops of chemical agent beyond the smokestacks. Additional monitoring farther from the stack suggests they dispersed a few feet from the mouth of the flue.

In its 2002 chemical events study, the NRC found the chemical agent vapors produced in September 1993 from a single stockpiled leaking container swamped the total agent emissions produced during 15 years of incinerator operations. The leak produced vapors several hundred thousand times greater than any to billow out a stack.

The NRC concluded storage is a far greater risk than the theoretical range of risk posed by burning the weapons.

Anniston Army Depot holds more "leakers" than any of the nation's eight stockpiles. Its workers have detected, isolated and containerized more than 850.

"We are sole proprietor of the infamous 'leaker' lot," explained Army stockpile spokeswoman Cathy Coleman. There is a slim chance the leakers could set off an explosion.

Once accused of exaggerating the risk that a rocket might auto-ignite, the Army took a second look, adjusted the numbers and softened the rhetoric.

"There was a theory," said Army chemical demilitarization spokesman Greg Mahall, "that the degradation and leaking of the rocket might cause the agent to mix with propellants resulting in heat reactions." The theory, he continued, is that a rocket might ignite in a bunker with thousands of other rockets. A chain reaction could eventually blow the bunker's reinforced concrete lid. It is a worst-case scenario.

"The study concluded that, while a leaking M-55 rocket is more likely to auto ignite than a non-leaking rocket, the chances of such an event occurring are extremely remote," Mahall said.

Risk to workers at incineration facilities has proven extremely low. Of the 40 known chemical events at the two operating incineration facilities, the Army has confirmed only two exposures. Neither took place during weapons processing.

Williams rejects the exposure findings, arguing that the Army's definition of exposure is flawed. The same definition, however, is used at neutralization facilities.

The first exposure, at Johnston Atoll in 1993, involved a small amount of mustard that splattered a maintenance worker. The second, at Tooele in July 2002, happened when a maintenance worker was replacing a valve. Liquid sarin spilled, the worker received immediate treatment and returned to work the same day.

To date, incineration has destroyed 25 percent of the nation's 30,000-ton stockpile with only those two exposures and no harm to surrounding communities.

Any exposure is too many, said Garrett. He suggested worker safety is the benchmark for community safety. "The community is also that worker," he said, announcing his priorities.

"If we protect that worker, then the community is fine."

In theory, neutralization offers some added controls over incineration once weapons reach the processing line. But the advantages are uncertain, and possibly negligible, when contrasted beside incinerators, which the NRC describes as "virtual fortresses."

For example, at Anniston, a foundation that, at spots, reaches a depth of 13 feet anchors the facility. Steel-reinforced poured concrete walls, some 24-30 inches thick, can absorb the worst explosions. And the incinerator will not process enough agent at any given time to "cause impact to the community," Garrett insists.

Incineration and neutralization experts agree the greatest risks are the perils of continued storage and movement of weapons. Those dangers are just as likely to occur with either incineration or neutralization.

Williams acknowledges this as well. "I think movement of the weapons is clearly the riskiest function if you are comparing it with storage and treatment operations."

The Army's neutralization experts won't say the technology they work with is safer than incineration.

"To say that neutralization is safer than incineration is not an accurate statement that reflects where we are today," Flamm said of the pilot programs that have yet to be fully tested.
Gelled rockets, ones in which the agent solidifies, present problems "regardless the technology you use," said Jim Richmond, the lead chemist at the Blue Grass depot. The weapons must be sheared no matter the destruction process.

Hazards that most increase risk, Mahall said, include, "a fire in the munitions demilitarization building, an igloo handling accident, a plane crash, tornadoes, seismic events

So the riskiest process in transportation is moving the weapons from the igloo to the transportation container." Neutralization facilities also will have transport containers.

Regardless the technology, any of these unlikely events could occur.

Retrofit: a casual term

The activists have not applied the same microscopic scrutiny to neutralization that they have to incineration.

Downing was unaware of the neutralization exposures during Project Eagle, of the proposed smokestacks at the neutralization facility in Colorado, of the dioxins and furans that facility will emit, and of the comparative emissions produced by regional industries. Williams was unaware of all the information except the number of stacks at Colorado. He had a hard time accepting that dioxin emissions at Colorado are projected to exceed those at incinerators, but concluded, "If you ask ACWA something, they will tell you the truth."

Both men vehemently oppose incineration.

Williams and other activists have suggested retrofitting existing incinerators, like the one in Anniston, so they can employ neutralization. Williams suggests it could be done in as little as 12 to 18 months.

Experts say the suggested retrofit is likely impossible.

Incinerators are hulking facilities built to withstand explosions. Their integrated systems don't move easily. They are bolted in place, welded together and surrounded by walls that were built to stay where they are.

Mahall said he is unaware of any credible study for retrofitting, but speculated the theoretical concept is impossible once construction of an incinerator reaches 20 percent.

Once they reach that mark, he said, the Army's only remaining option would be to construct a parallel operation. In the case of Anniston, it would run roughly the same price as the incinerator.

"I think you would have to start all over," said Bob Love, manager of Westinghouse-Anniston, the contractor that constructed and operates the incinerator.

Williams said he has information that shows retrofitting of an existing facility can be done. When asked to provide that information, he said he couldn't.

A monster's fiery end

Since the battle in Belgium that first dropped weapons of mass destruction on men, militaries around the globe have designed more sinister plagues for war. Nerve agents. Germ warfare. Nuclear bombs. They belong to the same class weapon, that of mass destruction. A scarred world in a new age of terror only can pray a similar fate awaits all weapons of mass destruction.

During the waning days of the last century at a meeting in Paris, a group of leaders decided the world had seen enough of chemical weapons. Since then, the number of signatory nations on the Chemical Weapons Convention has grown to represent 90 percent of the world's population, 92 percent of its landmass and 98 percent of its chemical industry.

The Army can attest that ridding the world of a monster is not without its controversy.
In the once-quiet Southern town of Anniston, a nagging debate rages between neighbors as 2,200 tons of VX, sarin and mustard collect dust in leaky containers.

A few hundred steady-handed employees will don alien-looking bubble suits soon, dragging air-fed hoses behind them as they snake through what resembles the hull of a great ship.

Men like Bob Love, a veteran of Johnston Atoll, and Tim Garrett will direct their steps.

Love talked briefly about the meaning of demilitarization. He spoke of the 20 years he spent in the Navy in the belly of a nuclear submarine. Back then, there were days when he wondered would this be the hour of a countdown, would the world survive a nuclear war.

Then he spoke of the tingles he got on Johnston Atoll every time he saw a chemical weapons bunker emptied.

"I retired from (the Navy), and now getting to destroy some of this stuff, it's pretty good," Love said, smiling.

Garrett broke in and spoke of the mission. It was an idealized account of how a well-paid work force here in Anniston was going to slay the monster by placing it in a fiery furnace.

"There is an objective," he said slowly, deliberately, measuring each word. "You can see that objective and strive to reach it.

"We have a work force that is eager to get started to meet that objective.