Anniston Star
August 29, 2003

Non-stockpile items unresolved issue at depot

By Nathan Solheim
Star Staff Writer
08-29-2003

Now that the process of destroying 2,254 tons of chemical munitions at Anniston Army Depot has begun, a remaining issue is what will happen to 1,567 pounds of non-stockpile items stored at the depot.

The Army has not made any official movement on destroying the non-stockpile items, officials said, other than a 2001 feasibility study and an analysis by the program overseeing the chemical stockpile.

Army officials have focused on starting the disposal process at the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility and said they haven’t done much with the non-stockpile items, other than dispelling the notion that chemical munitions or non-stockpile items could be brought to the incinerator.

Federal law prohibits transporting chemical stockpile across state lines, and state law prohibits non-stockpile items from entering Alabama. Incinerator officials repeatedly have said they have no plans to bring additional chemical materials to Anniston Army Depot for disposal.

“The only thing we are permitted to bring in here is the current declared stockpile items,” said Army spokesman Mike Abrams.

Army officials are left to navigate state and federal laws and decide how to destroy the non-stockpile items.

“Non-stockpile” is a term for items that are not part of the chemical stockpile. They could be items found at old defense sites or disposed of using techniques long ago determined to be detrimental to the environment or public health.

The three types of known non-stockpile items stored at the depot include: one-ton containers partly filled with GB nerve agent; transportation bottles resembling SCUBA diving air tanks, filled with various types of agent; and a small number of GB-filled glass vials in ammunition boxes.

All three types of non-stockpile items contain chemical agent in varying volumes – from milligrams to gallons.

According to Army data collected in the mid-1990s, Anniston has two transportation bottles of thickened mustard agent, three others with distilled mustard agent, and seven transportation bottles filled with VX. There are two one-ton containers partly filled with GB and nine empty one-ton containers. There are 36 glass vials filled with GB.

By military standards, the quantity of non-stockpile items stored at the depot is small, said one official.

Other facilities, such as the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, have entire igloos of non-stockpile items, said Greg Mahall, a spokesman for the Chemical Materials Agency, which oversees the nation’s chemical disposal programs.

“I would think in the grand scheme of things, that’s minor,” Mahall said of Anniston’s non-stockpile inventory.

Non-stockpile items are the product of a system put in place at the depot in the early 1990s to study agent in the munitions and analyze samples of it.

That system was called drill-and-transfer, and hasn’t been used in several years.

“If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t have the things designated non-stockpile,” said Cathy Coleman of the Anniston Chemical Activity, which oversees the chemical weapons stockpile. “It’s such a minor thing for us.”

There is a narrow provision for non-stockpile items to be shipped away from their storage facilities or where they are located to disposal facilities in Pine Bluff or Tooele, Utah, but officials with the Chemical Materials Agency said the chance of that is small.

When buried chemical munitions were dug up in the Washington suburb of Spring Valley, Md., in 1993, federal officials mapped out a procedure for temporary storage and then transportation to Utah or Arkansas.

However, officials have shifted from the practice over the past decade in favor of a mobile explosive destruction system: an explosion containment room and neutralization facility on wheels, said Jeff Lindblad, a non-stockpile official with the Chemical Materials Agency.

An explosive destruction system destroyed a 4.2-inch mortar round containing phosgene – a choking agent – last year in Gadsden after it was dug up on the grounds of the former Camp Siebert.

Because Anniston’s non-stockpile items are quantified, and because the process involves many layers of government, moving the non-stockpile items most likely would not be the Army’s course of action, Lindblad said.

The more likely solution would be for the Army to move an explosive destruction system, which is mobile, to the depot and dispose of the non-stockpile items, Lindblad said.

A third method to dispose of the non-stockpile items would be to feed them to the incinerator.

A study published in 2001 by the Mitretek Corporation found that the incinerator can process non-stockpile items but some modifications would be required to handle them.

The study also says it would be more cost effective to process the non-stockpile items in the incinerator rather than bringing in the explosive destruction system.

The cost, the study says, would be about $1.3 million for incineration as opposed to about $3 million for the explosive destruction system.

“I think it would make sense to use the facility for those items,” Abrams said. “But I don’t know all the requirements we’d have to meet to handle the non-stockpile material.”

The Army’s state permit does not address disposing of non-stockpile items, and several other federal permits and laws would have to be considered.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management would have to approve any Army plan to destroy non-stockpile items, as well.

Jim Grassiano, ADEM section chief for government facilities, said the Army has not contacted his agency about the non-stockpile issue, but he said ADEM expects a request.

“We haven’t had any significant discussion on it yet, but it’s conceivable that that will happen at some point in the future,” Grassiano said.

A possibility remains that other material or non-stockpile items could crop up as the Army continues destroying chemical munitions, Abrams said, but nothing has turned up.

Gov. Bob Riley, when he was a congressman, said the incinerator should be used for destroying only the chemical weapons at the depot. The other possible material that could be brought to the incinerator would be chemical ordnance from McClellan, if any is found, or from Pelham Range, but no decisions have been made, Riley has said.

Incineration opponents raise no serious questions over disposing of non-stockpile items, if neutralization is used to do it.

Craig Williams, of the Berea, Ky.,-based Chemicals Weapons Working Group, reiterated his organization’s opposition to incinerating any chemical weapons.

“We don’t think incineration is a safe and protective disposal system for chemical weapons regardless of their classification,” Williams said. “That’s been our position, and that’s galvanized over the years because of our monitoring of the performance and reliability of the baseline incineration approach over the past 15 years.”