By Jeremy Manier
Tribune staff reporter

March 22, 2004

A controversial new plan to dispose of U.S. Army nerve agent stockpiled in Indiana would ship the resulting 3.6 million gallons of waste 1,000 miles to a treatment plant in New Jersey, where the proposal has brought swift opposition.

One proposed shipping route would take the VX wastewater through Chicago rail yards--though planners said their preferred route would not pass through Illinois.

The plan, released earlier this month by the chemical firm DuPont, marks the second proposal in the last year for getting rid of the VX nerve agent, one of the deadliest known substances.

An attempt to ship the VX wastewater from the Army base on the Indiana-Illinois border to Dayton, Ohio, failed in October in the face of opposition from local officials and an independent report on the risks, which included release of potentially hazardous compounds into the sewer system.

DuPont and the Army said the wastewater poses no real threat to the environment, and its components are not especially dangerous. But officials with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disputed DuPont's contention that CDC scientists had independently reviewed a company study that found the disposal could be done safely.

The latest proposal is part of the U.S. government's troubled, 18-year effort to dispose of more than 30,000 tons of chemical weapons, which must be destroyed by 2007 under an international treaty.

In the case of VX, the Army faces the daunting task of taking a deadly molasses-like liquid--just one drop on the skin can kill a person in minutes--and transforming it into wastewater safe enough to release into New Jersey's Delaware River.

The mere mention of VX has spurred opposition to the project, said Col. Jesse Barber, who is directing the effort to dispose of the VX at the Army's Newport, Ind., base.

"When the public hears the words VX, they immediately get very fearful," Barber said. "They think, `Oh my God. There's nerve agent coming to my neighborhood'--which isn't true."

A DuPont statement released March 4 said that CDC scientists had done an independent review of the company's finding that the VX wastewater "poses no unique hazards." But CDC officials said last week that the agency has not yet done a thorough review of the plan.

"We haven't really been involved in the way DuPont claims we were involved," said Jennifer Sarginson, a spokeswoman for CDC's National Center for Environmental Health.

Sarginson said CDC scientists have looked at part of the plan and sent some comments to the Army that have not yet been answered. A congressional mandate requires that the CDC fully review the disposal plan before the project begins.

The environmental microbiologist who evaluated the original plan for Dayton, Northwestern University professor Bruce Rittman, said the unknowns in the disposal process add to its risk.

"These weapons were not designed to fall apart--the Army wanted them to stick around a while," Rittman said.

Although the U.S. has destroyed VX with incinerators, no one has attempted to destroy a large stockpile using the chemical neutralization process proposed for the VX from Newport. The base is a high-security storage depot for 1,269 tons of VX--more than twice as much as what the U.S. government alleged Iraq possessed under Saddam Hussein.

DuPont has outlined five potential shipping routes to get the VX wastewater to the company's huge treatment plant in Deepwater, N.J. About 1.2 million people live within a half-mile of the route that would pass through Illinois, the study found.

For any of the routes, it would take 758 shipments to get all the wastewater to New Jersey, DuPont estimates.

Officials in New Jersey, including Gov. James McGreevey and the state's two U.S. senators, already have voiced concern about the new disposal plan.

Environmental groups in New Jersey and Indiana have questioned the proposal. Sierra Club officials in both states want the Army to revive an earlier plan that would have disposed of the VX at a new facility on the Indiana site.

"That was the plan, and we were happy with it," said Bill Hayden, conservation chair of the Sierra Club's Indiana chapter.

But that plan was scrapped in 2001 after the attacks of Sept. 11, which raised concerns that America's chemical weapons stockpiles might be targets for terrorist strikes.

Although the Army decided to accelerate the disposal schedule after Sept. 11, a General Accounting Office report last year concluded the nationwide program still is plagued by delays and cost overruns. Since 1998, the estimated cost of destroying the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons has risen to $24 billion from $15 million.

The Newport VX accounts for 4 percent of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile. It was made in the 1960s when Newport Chemical Depot was the Army's sole source of the nerve agent.

To chemically neutralize the nerve agent, which kills by disrupting signals between nerve cells, the Army base at Newport will use a chemical process called hydrolysis. When combined with a mixture of hot water and sodium hydroxide, the VX breaks down into compounds considered far less dangerous than the original nerve agent.

"Once you destroy the VX molecule at Newport you essentially rip it apart," said Todd Owens, a chemical engineer at DuPont. "Once it's destroyed, there's no chance to make it VX again."

Yet some experts caution that relatively little is known about MPA and EMPA, two of the main byproducts of VX hydrolysis.

"There really isn't much written on them," said Rittman of Northwestern. "Until you hydrolyze VX there's no reason to make these compounds."

A DuPont study on rats concluded that MPA and EMPA would not be dangerous, with toxicity comparable to that of table salt.

But some engineers said that's a misleading comparison.

"I would not equate the hydrolysate with table salt," said David Kosson, chairman of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University. "Let's be real, we're starting with nerve agent."

Still, Kosson, who until 2002 was on a National Research Council committee that evaluated chemical weapons disposal, said the Army's disposal technique should be safe. He said the chemical soup that results from the breakdown of VX is "well within the realm of traditional wastewater."

In Rittman's evaluation of the now-abandoned Dayton plan, he cited a National Research Council study that indicated the VX wastewater could recombine to form VX--though only if someone intentionally put a strong acid into the mix.

Many experts said the only immediate risk from the VX wastewater is that it is very corrosive--comparable to oven cleaner, according to DuPont.

The Army and DuPont say the wastewater is so different from the original VX agent that they prefer not even to call it "VX hydrolysate"--the term most scientific papers have used. Instead, the DuPont study coined the term "Newport Caustic Hydrolysate."

"The only thing unique about my waste is the source," Barber said. "Let's focus on the issue at hand and not focus on the stigma of nerve agent."

The ultimate destination of the wastewater is DuPont's Secure Environmental Treatment facility in Deepwater, N.J., where the company would treat the waste with a combination of bacteria and chemical and physical filters. The treated wastewater would be released into the Delaware River.

Nancy Love, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who reviewed DuPont's disposal plan at the company's request, said she was impressed with the toxicity tests DuPont used, and said the wastewater should not directly harm wildlife.

But Love said the VX wastewater would release into the river small amounts of phosphorus, which acts as a nutrient for marine algae. In theory more algae could grow and die, creating more food for other organisms that consume oxygen in the water, and changing the sort of wildlife the water can support.

"Phosphorus can cause accelerated aging of a water body," Love said. "That's the bigger concern--how this material would act as a nutrient."

DuPont does not yet have a contract to treat the VX wastewater, though Army officials said they would like to begin disposing of the VX sometime this summer. In case the plan stalls, the Army is looking into storing the wastewater in tanks being built at the Newport stockpile.

One of the fundamental problems with the long-delayed project, Rittman said, is that the VX disposal process still amounts to a scientific experiment. He said PermaFix, the company originally contracted to do the disposal in Dayton, ran into unexpected technical barriers.

"It was a lot harder than they anticipated," Rittman said. "If this were easy someone would have thought of a solution by now.