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


Vol. 12, No. 13--June 29, 2004


IMPLEMENTING AIRBORNE EXPOSURE LIMITS IS CHALLENGING, OFFICIAL SAYS


The Army's chemical demilitarization program is facing a major challenge in implementing updated airborne exposure limits for chemical agents, determining how the limits will be applied at each facility and the processes involved in remaining below the limits, a top Pentagon official said earlier this month.

The chemical demilitarization program is trying to figure out how to implement the standards, how they will affect operations, and how they affect the rate at which the weapons will be destroyed to stay within environmental permit requirements, Patrick Wakefield said June 16 in a speech to chemical demilitarization industry officials. Wakefield is the deputy assistant to the defense secretary for chemical demilitarization and threat reduction.

"A lot of this is still unfolding right now. Risk assessment experts are examining this now. We don't know the full depth yet," he said.

The program is also working to increase weapons processing rates and to deal with the disposal of secondary waste, he said. "Waste continues to be a challenge in the overall program," he said. Tooele, in particular, "certainly has its fair share of waste that has been stored there that now has to be managed," but Anniston, the only other chemical weapons incinerator currently operating, is working on this issue so that it does not have to deal with legacy waste, he said.

And off- site treatment of secondary waste remains a controversial issue, he said. "I think that's something that will always be there. I think it's because of the public's genuine concern that the public asks for this to be addressed,"he said.

Currently, the Army is waiting for reports from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on the impacts of a plan to ship secondary waste from its Newport, IN, neutralization facility to a commercial wastewater treatment plant in New Jersey. New Jersey and Delaware officials have expressed concern over the plan, and Wakefield said that until the concerns "are addressed, we will not be able to move forward. Should this not be successful, the program will have to" reexamine its options.

But Wakefield praised the U.S. chemical demilitarization program for meeting destruction deadlines and said the international community is "very excited about the U.S. efforts." Other countries "constantly look to the U.S. for leadership on these issues and certainly the technical capability we possess," he said.

"We've met every treaty deadline thus far that's been placed upon the U.S.," he said. "While we've extended one of the deadlines, that was a provision provided by the treaty, and certainly we have gone through that process." But internationally, aside from some of the politics, "we are certainly a nation that is looked upon in the most favorable light in that effort," he said.

Last year, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) approved a U.S. request to extend an interim destruction deadline until Dec. 31, 2007. OPCW is the body that oversees compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the international treaty governing chemical weapons disposal. Originally, the United States was to have destroyed 45 percent of its chemical weapons stockpile by the end of April 2004 (Defense Environment Alert, Nov. 4, 2003, p7).

As of May 30, the United States has destroyed about 29 percent of the stockpile, Wakefield said.

But a source who follows chemical weapons destruction issues says that proclaiming the United States is meeting its deadlines is "a little in the eyes of the beholder." The United States easily met the first two interim deadlines of 1 percent and 20 percent because the country began its destruction efforts before the CWC went into effect, the source says. And all the U.S. stockpile sites have seen slippage in their predicted schedules for destruction, the source says.