| Officials at a chemical weapons disposal
facility in Newport, Ind., say they’re ready to restart VX destruction. But
several issues with a byproduct of the destruction process still need to
be resolved.
Destruction of bulk VX stopped June 10 after VX and
wastewater leaked in a sealed area of the facility.
The timing of the leak came close to a scheduled shutdown,
but engineers later discovered that a byproduct of weapons processing has
a lower flash point than previously thought. The discovery has lengthened
the shutdown to two months.
"That was not our plan," Newport spokeswoman Terry Arthur
said. "Our plan was two weeks."
Arthur said weapons disposal could resume in late August
or early September, following a "demonstration of safe operations" next week.
Unlike Anniston and other active disposal facilities,
Newport destroys its bulk VX through a chemical neutralization process, in
which VX is mixed with sodium hydroxide (lye) and hot water. The resulting
byproduct, called a hydrolysate, must be chemically treated before being
released.
The byproduct has become a headache for officials. The
Army wants to send it to a DuPont plant at Deepwater Point on the Delaware
River in New Jersey. DuPont would recover phosphonates from the hydrolysate
before releasing it into the Delaware River. The Centers for Disease Control
withheld recommendation of the plan in April, saying the agency lacked sufficient
information about DuPont’s treatment plan. New Jersey congressional representatives
have voiced strong opposition to the proposal.
The Army has provided the needed information to the CDC,
said Jeffrey Lindblad, a spokesman for the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency,
which supervises chemical weapons disposal throughout the country.
"We’re still providing them with information, and meeting
with the EPA and the CDC, but they’ve told us they’re not really sure when
they’ll have it done," he said.
The byproduct will be stored at Newport until a plan
is approved. The facility can store 300,000 gallons of the hydrolysate, Arthur
said.
In the meantime, engineers at Newport are looking into
ways to increase the flash point of the hydrolysate. Officials say the byproduct’s
flash point is between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit — well below the 200
degrees they initially expected.
The flash point is the temperature at which a flammable
liquid forms a vapor and is therefore able to ignite. It is not the same as
the ignition temperature, which is the temperature at which a mixture of
flammable vapor and air would ignite. When a flammable material is in its
liquid state, it will not ignite. But its vapor will burn if raised to its
ignition temperature.
Officials say the solution, which is 70 to 80 percent
water, probably would not ignite, but adjustments are being made in the disposal
process to reduce the possibility.
"Now that we have actual data from the full-scale process,
we have been able to compare it to the laboratory baseline data from which
we had been working, and (will) begin looking at ways to adjust the process
to address issues such as the flammability factor," Newport project site
manager Jeff Brubaker said in a prepared statement.
"This is an important aspect of beginning operations
in a pilot plant like the NECDF, and was critical in our gradual, deliberate
start of operations."
Lindblad said the flash point is "not a major issue,"
noting that materials with lower flash points, like gasoline, routinely are
shipped between states. "But we in the Army are not going to ship anything
offsite until we determine it’s safe," he said.
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