Defense Environment Alert
an exclusive biweekly report on defense policies for cleanup, compliance and pollution prevention


Vol. 12, No. 5--March 9, 2004


NRC URGING ARMY TO ABANDON PLANS FOR FIXED NON-STOCKPILE PLANT

The National Research Council (NRC) in a new report is urging the Army to scrap plans to build a permanent facility to treat stored non-stockpile chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. Instead, the NRC says the Army should use a proven, transportable technology that has widespread citizen support.

At issue is the Army's plan to build a facility at Pine Bluff to destroy some 1,200 recovered munitions, mainly 4.2-inch mortar rounds containing mustard agent and 15-centimeter German Traktor rockets (GTR) containing a variety of chemical agent. Pine Bluff has 85 percent of the known non-stockpile materiel in the United States, most of which was recovered from excavated burial pits at Pine Bluff.

The Pine Bluff Non-Stockpile Facility (PBNSF) would rely in large part on legacy equipment from a discontinued technology research project, as well as processing equipment developed under the stockpile program's Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment program.

In the March 8 report Assessment of the Army Plan for the Pine Bluff Non-Stockpile Facility, the NRC committee says it has serious reservations about the desirability of implementing the PBNSF design concept. The committee outlines concerns about worker safety, the risk of failure to achieve an April 2007 international treaty deadline to
destroy the weapons, cost, complexity, and "the relative lack of robustness that is inherent in the current design."

Instead, the committee presents two alternative approaches that would implement multiple explosive destruction systems (EDSs), a transportable system that detonates munitions inside a sealed pressure vessel and then neutralizes the remaining chemical agent. It has already been used at four other sites, and the committee says two or three EDS units can perform most if not all of the tasks currently planned for the PBNSF.

"The new challenges that would be posed by changing to a new operational concept at this late stage in the design planning for PBNSF should be no greater than those associated with meeting the deadline with currently planned PBNSF operations," the report says. The permitting process for the PBNSF is behind schedule, according to the committee, but Arkansas regulators are already considering permitting an EDS that would be used to destroy munitions too unstable to move to the PBNSF.

Under the first option, the Army would just use EDSS. But this scenario is contingent on the ability to remove the rocket motors from the 31 GTRs whose rocket motors contain propellant.

The second option, which the report says the Army is evaluating, would replace most of the planned components of the PBNSF with EDSs but would retain one of the explosive containment chambers (ECC) for processing the propellant-filled GTR motors. "Use of the ECC-2 is necessary to process the complete GTRs because the total net explosive weight of the GIR, including propellant, exceeds the containment capacity of both EDS systems," the report says.

"[T]he committee's proposal for an alternative configuration for PBNSF using multiple-EDS units is a consequence of the success of EDS deployments, both technically and with respect to public acceptability, at four non-stockpile sites across the United States," the report says. "It is also a logical extension of the Army's efforts to enhance the efficacy of EDS units - such as multiple-round testing - as well as ongoing Army activities aimed at
separating GTR warheads from their motors and improving the characterization of the contents of the recovered chemical munitions in storage at Pine Bluff."

The NRC panel says there is very little slack time in the schedule to construct, test and operate the PBNSF because of the international treaty deadline. And several issues remain unresolved. The ability of the PBNSF processing equipment to process energetically configured 4.2-inch mortar rounds containing gelled or solidified mustard hasnot been demonstrated, nor has it been demonstrated that the current PBNSF design can neutralize some of the agents in the GTRs that have high levels of arsenic, the report says.

Additionally, while "the Army has determined the design to be consistent with Army safety regulations the inability of the building as designed to withstand the maximum credible event (MCE) seems inconsistent with the congressional mandate to provide 'maximum protection for the environment, the general public, and the personnel who are involved in the destruction of the lethal chemical agents and munitions,"' the committee says. The Army defines an MCE to be the detonation of a fully configured GTR motor and warhead combination while being processed in the PBNSF.

The report also makes several recommendations on ways to increase public involvement in the non-stockpile disposal process at Pine Bluff. These include the Army: