Anniston Star
September 19, 2003

Anniston's incinerator is faster than its predecessors

By Nathan Solheim
Star Staff Writer
09-19-2003

Anniston’s chemical weapons incinerator is destroying M55 rockets filled with GB nerve agent at a faster clip than its two predecessors did.

Officials at the Anniston Chemical Disposal Facility are quick to say they are not working to meet any specific scheduling goal, but the incinerator has destroyed 2,867 rockets. That’s more than the combined progress of two earlier incinerators after their first 40 days of operations.

According to figures released by the Army Thursday, the incinerator at Tooele, Utah, had destroyed about 1,300 rockets 40 days out from startup and the Johnston Island incinerator had destroyed about 1,000 rockets 40 days after startup.

“A lot’s happened since we started processing,” said project manager Tim Garrett at a press conference Thursday. “I’d like to say I’m proud of the work force, and the work so far has been good.”

The Anniston incinerator is the only chemical disposal facility currently operating. The Tooele, Utah incinerator has been shut down since Sept. 1 for maintenance. A neutralization facility in Newport, Ind., is scheduled to begin operations in January, after workers finish installing a wet fire-suppression system to couple with a dry fire-suppression system. A neutralization facility in Aberdeen, Md., could resume operations in October. Workers had to evacuate that plant because of smoke in a filter system.

Officials at the Anniston incinerator are currently in a shakedown period, testing the facility and working out any kinks in the system.

The next major benchmark in the Army’s plans to dispose of 2,253 tons of Cold War-era chemical weapons stored in igloos at the Anniston Army Depot over the next seven years will be the facility’s agent trial burns in November.

Officials will have to demonstrate the full capability of the facility to government regulators and show it can burn 99.9999 percent of the agent.

Bob Love, who ran the incinerator on Johnston Island for Westinghouse and is now working in the same position here at Anniston, said the progress thus far has gone as planned.

“At Johnston Island, that was the first time this was ever done,” Love said. “Here, we have people who have done it before and we knew the problems in the equipment and we were ready for them.”

The incinerator has experienced several periods of down time for maintenance or repairs, totaling 11 days since Aug. 9.

“It is not a bad thing to stop processing,” Garrett said. Every time we had a minor issue we stopped. To me, that was a conservative, good management call.”

Army officials also have destroyed bulk liquid agent during six burns, destroying more than 3,000 gallons of deadly nerve agent that had been drained from rockets.

Two chemical weapons storage magazines, called igloos, have been completely cleared of their contents.

“That’s a good indicator of how we’re doing,” Garrett said. “I’m proud of that and the crews in charge of moving weapons.”

Incinerator workers will have to demonstrate for regulators that the facility can destroy between 750 and 1,000 pounds — 110 gallons — of bulk agent per hour in the facility’s liquid incinerator, and show they can destroy 40 M55 rockets per hour in the deactivation furnace.

Garrett said he’d like to have the trial completed a few days before Thanksgiving.

After the completion of the trial, the results are to be reviewed by various agencies, including the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the federal government though the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

After that, Garrett said, there is no definite timeline in place for the incinerator going to full capacity and operations. Regulators must review the data from the trial first, and it depends on how long that takes to do.

The incinerator only can operate at 50 percent of capacity during the data review, Garrett said.

The facility won’t start processing gelled rockets — rockets in which the agent no longer is fluid — until well after November, Garrett said.

“Those are a little harder to process — you have to have a special team literally take the munition apart,” Garrett said.

Asked what is the most challenging technical issue the facility has faced thus far, Garrett said it was the incident, shortly after startup, in which a small piece of metal fell into a chain on a conveyor belt and stopped it — and operations — for a couple of days.