When asked why she opposes dumping wastewater from a neutralized Cold War nerve agent into the Delaware River, Joyce Ronketty plops a handful of photos onto a table in her sun room.

They show her son and husband proudly holding striped bass they caught off their little dock along the river. They're monster-sized fish, with bodies as thick as Easter hams.

"This is the kind of life that we like here, and that's what we're going to lose," the 65-year-old Penns Grove, Salem County, resident said last week.

Like Ronketty, many who live, work and play along the river and bay remain adamantly opposed to the plan that calls for DuPont's Chambers Works plant to treat and discharge wastewater from VX nerve agent that has been neutralized at an Army chemical weapons depot in Indiana.

The DuPont plant, straddling Pennsville and Carneys Point near the Delaware Memorial Bridge, is just south of Ronketty's home.

Despite assurances that the wastewater will contain no nerve agent, Ronketty and many others feel betrayed that the river's ecological comeback could be threatened by the plan.

Their opposition to VX is visceral, rooted in a general mistrust of the federal government in general and the Army and DuPont in particular.

"I don't trust them; I just don't want it," said 69-year-old Sarah Redrow, who lives along Logan's Repaupo Creek, near a long levee that prevents the river from flooding the woods and swamps around her home.

She and her husband, Robert, want the nerve agent to stay in Indiana, where the Army is already filling big containers to begin trucking the wastewater once the moment is right.

In another part of Logan, Worthington Blum, 74, and Fran Jeffers, 81, hacked away at a rotting pontoon at the Raccoon Creek Boat Club, burning its fragments in a small bonfire. The retired DuPont employees see nothing wrong with the plan.

"If Uncle Sam says it's OK, it's OK with me," said Blum, a Logan resident who sampled and analyzed air and water samples during his career at Chambers Works.

"This stuff is supposed to be, as I understand it, deactivated before it gets here. The bad gas is gotten rid of in Indiana. I have no problem with it," he said.

But down along the bay, amid the farmland of Greenwich, Cumberland County, 31-year-old waterman Rob Malinowski bemoans the VX proposal.

"It seems good on paper; a lot of things seem good on paper," said Malinowski, who crabs, fishes and harvests oysters in the bay.

As he sees it, something has been wrong with the water flowing out of the river for some time. The muskrats that live in the marshes just aren't reproducing the way they once did, he said.

"Everything does come down here eventually, that's what it is," he said. "How much stuff are you going to put in the water before you say enough is enough?"

Like many, Jeff Beal, who runs a bait and tackle shop near the neck of the bay in Pennsville, thought the VX issue was dead. Now he hopes New Jersey politicians keep up their fight.

"I can't foresee anybody with any common sense saying releasing nerve gas into the river system is a good idea," he said.

Not surprisingly, opposition is strongest near the plant.

Penns Grove resident Melvin Bryant, 57, works dismantling ships in Philadelphia.

DuPont says that what it will put in the river is virtually pure water.

Bryant argues that whatever it is will slosh around a long time with the tides before eventually flushing into the bay.

"If they gonna do anything to (the river), they should be held responsible for it," he said.

Barbara Scofield, 62, notes that Penns Grove is trying to stage a comeback through its RiverWalk retail redevelopment plan. But she fears DuPont is angling to get many more Army wastewater-disposal contracts.

"This is a poverty-stricken town and people have high hopes for it, and this VX gas is another thing that's not good," said Scofield.

But back up the river in Gloucester County, Paul Dybus, 35, a sheet metal worker from Oaklyn, worked his fishing line at the base of the levee near Redrows' house.

"If the CDC says it's all right, I guess it's fine by me," said Dybus, who has fished the Delaware and its tributaries most of his life. "It's not like I eat fish out of the Delaware anyway."

Reach Lawrence Hajna at (856) 486-2466 or lhajna@courierpostonline.com