Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass Team, awarded a contract in June 2003 by the Department of Defense's Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, is now in the design phase of its program to destroy chemical weapons stockpiles stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot, located near Richmond, Ky.
Following completion of the design phase, a schedule will be developed and subsequent phases, which are expected to bring hundreds of jobs to the area over the course of the project, will include construction, systemization, pilot testing, operations and eventually closure. The project's goal is to complete operations by the April 2012 deadline set by the Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty. Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass will operate the destruction facility, a state-of-the-art, full-scale pilot facility designed to safely and efficiently neutralize the Blue Grass Chemical Weapons stockpile, which is comprised of 523 tons of blister agent in projectiles and nerve agent in projectiles and rockets.
"We're designing a plant that uses a technology called hydrolysis or neutralization," explained Mickey Morales, public involvement manager for Bechtel Parsons. "There's basically two main technologies for getting rid of chemical weapons - incineration and neutralization. Four of the sites in the U.S. are using incineration and four are using neutralization, and we’re one of the four using neutralization."
Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass is currently in the design stage of the program and is hoping to start construction possibly as early as spring of 2006, provided they receive adequate funding. "There's two phases of construction," Morales continued. "What we're going to be doing in the early construction stage is building an access road from the Depot boundary to where the weapons are stored, a new gate and an administrative building for the workforce. The main phase of the construction is the actual disposal facility, which covers about 19 acres. It is a fairly large facility because the main building is where the weapons are destroyed."
During the construction phase, the company will reach a peak hiring level of about 1,000 people. "A lot of those will be construction jobs," Morales said. "During 24-hour operations, we're going to have a peak of approximately 800 people. Our goal is to hire locally as much as possible, but you have to hire the people with the right skills sets, which will be everything from janitors to Ph.D. scientists and engineers. Positions will be subcontracted, and some will be direct hire, depending on the type of job. We're not out there hiring right now because we're still designing, and we still don't have the go-ahead to start construction, which may not be until March of 2006."
On July 26, a public meeting was held in Madison County to update the community on the project and provide information on some of the re-design Bechtel Parsons is looking at to save costs. "We're also looking at a method to possibly work on the rockets before the plant is built to make them safer to lower their risk," Morales said.
"Things are going pretty good right now," Morales added. "We did reach a period last year where there were some funding constraints that we had to work through. We also had to implement a hiring freeze, but right now it looks like we may have enough funding to approve the design and start early construction. As far as what the future will hold, we're going to continue from now until the November 2005 timeframe with our intermediate design of the main building, and then we're supposed to complete that intermediate design by June of 2006."
The companies comprising the Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass Team have designed, built and operated all the chemical weapons destruction facilities in the United States. Together with the Blue Grass Army Depot, the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Program has worked with the community in selecting neutralization followed by supercritical water oxidization as the technology to destroy the chemical weapons stored at the depot.
The Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass Team is comprised of Bechtel National, a world leader in safely managing large, complex engineering, construction and remediation projects; Parsons Infrastructure and Technology Group, which has more than 20 years of continuous involvement in U.S. and international chemical weapons elimination; Washington Demilitarization Company, which has over 32 years of experience with the U.S. Chemical Weapons Elimination Program; Battelle Memorial Institute, which develops and commercializes technology for industry and government customers; General Physics, one of the world's largest workforce development companies; and General Atomics, which performs diversified research and engineering for power generation, energy conversion, waste management, environmental restoration, and advanced defense systems.
Kevin Kerfoot is the publisher of Bluegrass Music Profiles magazine www.bluegrassmusicprofiles.com and the editor of Manufacturing & Technology magazine, both based in central Kentucky.
Aug 12, 2005