Birmingham News
September 29, 2003

Army to check incinerator emissions in November

09/27/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

The Army will begin testing its chemical weapons incinerator for hazardous emissions in the first 23 days of November, state regulators announced Friday.
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The incinerator at Anniston Army Depot began to burn M55 rockets Aug. 9 in a long, slow acceleration toward full speed. Army officials believe they'll reach that speed of 40 rockets per hour about the beginning of November.

Workers will then climb to the top of the stack at the incinerator, insert pollution control tubing and see if the burners are destroying 99.9999 percent of the hazardous waste, as the permit requires.

The testing will take several days as the staff puts the liquid and deactivation furnaces through their paces separately and with two different trials for each of several conditions, said Stephen Cobb, chief of the state's governmental hazardous waste division.

"There are at least two different sets of runs, a high temperature test and a low temperature test to set different parameters," Cobb said.

At the conclusion of the test, the final permit will be set using the temperatures and speeds at which the Army's contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, successfully burned weapons and sarin.

The incinerator will not be continuously monitored for such chemicals as PCBs, dioxins, furans and other hazardous wastes because of the difficulty and cost of the tests. Instead, the permit will assume that if the conditions are right, such as the temperature and rate of destruction, the burn will continue to be clean.

The Army is aiming to be able to burn 40 rockets an hour and 1,000 pounds of the lethal nerve gas sarin each hour.

"The entire process is, for the work force, a very technical and somewhat hazardous process, and we want to make sure that they become over a period of time very proficient and very confident," said Army spokesman Mike Abrams. "It is a very big leap to go from two rockets on Aug. 9 to 40 rockets per hour. It takes time to build up to that."

This week, the incinerator has been destroying rockets at a maximum rate of about 24 an hour and has destroyed 500 to 750 pounds of sarin in an hour, Abrams said.

Before trial burns start, incinerator staff must demonstrate the capacity to burn 90 percent of their target.

In the first seven weeks of operation, the incinerator has destroyed 4,180 rockets and 3,704 gallons, or 33,669 pounds, of sarin.

The Anniston Army Depot has been the stockpile of more than 662,000 chemical weapons since the beginning of the Cold War. It is one of eight sites nationwide where the Army is now destroying its stockpile with incinerators or chemical neutralization.