| Seven smooth days of operations have
followed three frustrating ones at the Anniston Chemical Weapons Disposal
Facility.
Officials say the test burn on the Metal Parts Furnace
at the facility has gone well since the burn began last Thursday. Mechanical
problems had delayed the testing from March 14 to March 16.
The test burn, which measures emissions and sets disposal
rates for the remaining projectiles at the facility, should be completed
today.
"After we had the initial problems, everything’s gone
extremely smoothly since then," said Jim Martin, the Army’s deputy site manager
for compliance. "We’re on our fourth agent trial burn, and everything is
on schedule."
A test burn lasts from seven to 10 days, with munitions
and natural gas passing through the furnace on alternating days. Natural gas
gives testers an idea of normal emissions from the furnace, before munitions
go through.
The facility is required to do four munitions burns
and three natural gas runs during the test burn, but Martin said the facility
would do an extra munitions run to ensure the data’s validity.
The incinerator must conduct a test burn every time
it changes to processing different type of weapon. The tests allow Alabama
Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) regulators to measure emissions
from the disposal process.
Crews at the incinerator spent weeks preparing for the
burn, which started Monday, March 14 but halted after a series of mechanical
problems. That Monday, a pump in a pollution cleaning system lost power.
The pump was not directly involved in the process, but officials decided
to shut down the pump to ensure that data collected from the burn would be
accurate.
Tuesday, a robot that drains chemical agent and a machine
that removes blasting caps from processed projectiles both suffered mechanical
problems. Wednesday, a sprocket broke on a conveyor belt.
Problems happening in quick succession are rare, Martin
said, and he called last week’s delays a streak of bad luck.
"These things happened all at once," Martin said. "Because
it’s a mechanical process, you’re going to run into things like this. We
encounter them. I wouldn’t say very often, but we go in, we fix them and
get them back up."
ADEM officials will have reports on emissions rates
in a few weeks, said Gerald Hardy, ADEM’s land division chief. The burn will
establish feed rates for 155-mm and 105-mm projectiles, the next weapons
to be destroyed in the incinerator.
The mechanical issues did not affect ADEM’s testing,
Hardy said, noting the furnace went through surrogate test burns – where
materials more difficult to destroy than sarin or VX go through the furnace
– in 2002 and 2003.
"Some of the things were normal mechanical wear, so
people might say, ‘Hey, it hasn’t run that long,’ but it was started up for
a period of time," he said.
The facility has destroyed the stockpile of M55 sarin-filled
rockets and sometime next month will have destroyed all of the eight-inch
artillery projectiles in storage. After a reconfiguration of equipment, the
facility will begin destroying 155-mm projectiles.
|
