Anniston Star
Feburary 13, 2003

Neutralization official defends process

By Jason Landers
Star Staff Writer
02-13-2003

The Army's leading neutralization official stressed this week that neutralization is as safe at destroying chemical weapons as incineration.

"The chemical neutralization process is fully matured and has been demonstrated to destroy chemical agents," Michael Parker said in a telephone interview.

Parker, the program manager for the Army's Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment, added that he is unaware of any credible study that shows the alternative is safer than incineration, which is how the Army plans to destroy its stockpile here in Anniston.

"There is no meaningful difference" between the level of safety the two technologies provide, he said.

Parker made the statements Monday. On Wednesday, the Department of Defense designated neutralization and supercritical water oxidation as the method for destroying stores of nerve and blister agent in Kentucky. Neutralization is a process that uses chemicals to detoxify the agents. A final decision on the technology to be used in Kentucky is expected within the next few weeks, Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment officials said.

At present, the nation's chemical demilitarization program is divided equally among the rival technologies.

There are eight chemical weapons stockpiles in the continental United States, including the one at the Anniston Army Depot. Four of those will use incineration to destroy roughly 80 percent of the nation's total stockpile. (Twenty-five percent of the total stockpile has been destroyed using this technique). Various neutralization technologies will be used at the other four sites, including Kentucky, to destroy the remainder.

Incineration opponents argue that neutralization is a safer alternative to the Army's preferred method of burning, and that there are studies that prove it. They claim facilities such as the chemical weapons incinerator in Anniston could be retrofitted to utilize the technology.

Parker says he is unaware of any study that shows an incineration facility can be retrofitted. Other Army officials have estimated it likely would be impossible to retrofit an incinerator once construction has reached 20 percent.

"Until such time as that study is done, it is just opinion," Parker said of the retrofit claims.

Craig Williams, director of the anti-incineration Chemical Weapons Working Group, acknowledged there is no official study for retrofitting an incinerator. But he said a private contractor has informed him about an "unofficial" study that suggests it could be done.

Williams said his group has asked the contractor to release the information. The activist said all attempts at making the data public have been unsuccessful.

In addition to speaking on the maturity of neutralization, Parker talked in-depth about issues he raised regarding a series of stories that ran in The Star between Dec. 28 and Jan. 1. Parker recently wrote the Pueblo, Colo., County Commission a letter that sought to clarify several points of contention raised in that series.

Dated Jan. 10, the letter said a line from the series that claimed the neutralization facility in Colorado will produce more dioxins and furans than an incinerator "is simply wrong."

During the interview, Parker acknowledged that certain aspects of the facility, which deal with treating secondary waste, have been shown to produce relatively high levels of dioxins and furans, cancer-causing contaminants. He added, however, that the final design for the facility will incorporate technology that reduces the contaminant levels to below detectable limits.

Bill Pehlivanian, the deputy manager for Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment, said the environmental impact statement for the Colorado site included a direct comparison of dioxin production at neutralization and incineration facilities.

Pehlivanian said the comparison showed that secondary-waste processors associated with the neutralization technology in Colorado did produce higher levels of dioxins and furans than an incinerator.

Like Parker, Pehlivanian stressed that the final design of the Colorado facility calls for additional measures to reduce the levels generated by these secondary waste units.

Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment officials say the design process for the Colorado facility is ongoing.

Parker also took exception to a line in the series that reported seven smokestacks likely will crown the Colorado facility. In his letter, he wrote that the number of stacks has not been determined. The Jan. 1 story did quote Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment officials as saying the number could change, though Parker did not acknowledge this in his letter.

"The system contractor is very early in the design phase and could suggest other approaches to generating process steam/hot water, potentially leading to a site free of smokestacks," Parker wrote.

During the interview, Parker said a facility with seven stacks has been used as a concept to develop cost and time schedules.

Additionally, Parker said that a reference in the series to an Army program from the 1970s, named Project Eagle, incorrectly stated that neutralization tests from the time either failed to completely destroy sarin nerve agent or didn't destroy it in the allotted time.

He said an analytic anomaly during Project Eagle caused the batches of neutralized sarin to appear to contain traces of nerve agent. He added that the Army confirmed in the 1970s and 1980s that the problem was analytic in nature.

That finding was not passed to a 1993 National Research Council report on alternative technologies. It described the neutralization activity during Project Eagle as inadequate, reporting that the technology didn't completely destroy the agent or took weeks to do it.

Additionally, the National Research Council report cited a 1987 Army study that suggested trace amounts of sarin in the neutralized batches "could have been an artifact" of the analytical methods. But the comment was far from the conclusive finding that Parker and others say countless tests have since demonstrated. Parker said the information should have been common knowledge by the time of the 1993 report.