Incinerator passes the retest

By Nathan Solheim
Assistant Metro Editor
04-01-2004

The Anniston Army Depot’s chemical weapons incinerator has passed retests of its ability to remove PCBs from its stack emissions, officials said Wednesday. Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency asked for the retesting after the incinerator failed its initial tests by the narrowest of margins in November. Incinerator officials have sent a letter asking the EPA to allow the facility to begin processing M-55 rockets filled with deadly GB nerve agent at a rate of about 17 per hour, which is 50 percent of the processing rate the facility has demonstrated in test burns. If the EPA signs off, the incinerator could start that work within a week. “I believe they’ll let us go to the 50 percent level,” said Tim Garrett, the Army site manager at the incinerator. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the incinerator must demonstrate that it can destroy 99.9999 percent of the PCBs contained in a rocket’s shipping and firing tube. In the failed round of tests, the incinerator met the standard one time, and three other times did not, achieving a range of from 99.99958 to 99.99985 percent destruction in samples taken from the stack, even though it met the standard in air samples taken farther back in the facility’s emission system. In the retests, the incinerator met requirements at ducts coming off its liquid incinerator and its deactivation furnace as well as at the stack. Army officials said the incinerator failed the initial tests because the quantity of PCBs to be destroyed was so small that it’s difficult to demonstrate the facility’s removal efficiency. This time, Garrett said, incinerator officials tried to find rockets with tubes that had higher concentrations of PCBs to make it easier to show that the facility can operate as billed. The incinerator removed PCBs down to one part per trillion after starting out with 6,400 parts per million in the rockets. Craig Williams, a critic of chemical weapons incineration, said the new test results do not show compliance with federal regulations and said the tests are in no way an indicator of its abilities. “They found a way to demonstrate compliance in a short-term exercise that in no way reflects their long-term ability to remain in compliance with the destruction requirements,” Williams said. “It doesn’t mean they’re in or out of compliance for the past 17,000 or the next 50,000 rockets.” EPA officials also had asked incinerator officials to study other sources of PCBs that could have affected results of the first round of tests. Garrett said the study found no smoking guns, but minute amounts of PCBs were identified in the air outside the incinerator. The incinerator uses outside air in the burning process. This time also, workers took pains to eliminate possible outside sources of PCBs in the labs where the air samples are analyzed. The first samples could have been contaminated in the lab. “I think the better results this time are because of the lab,” said Bob Love, the Westinghouse manager at the incinerator. Workers currently are conducting agent trial burns to test the incinerator’s ability to destroy rockets in which the agent has crystallized. Those tests should conclude this week, officials said. After that, Garrett said, incinerator workers probably will perform maintenance tasks until they hear from the EPA. To date, the incinerator has destroyed 21,974 M-55 rockets and 24,283 gallons of nerve agent.

About Nathan Solheim

Assistant Metro Editor Nathan Solheim is Minnesota native and a University of Georgia graduate.