Defense Environment Alert
July 16, 2002

NRC PANEL FINDS DESTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY IMMATURE FOR SOME ITEMS

The Army has adequate destruction technology available or under development for seven categories of nonstockpile chemical weapons, but for large volumes of these weapons, "significant additional investment and planning will be required to satisfactorily address" permitting and international treaty issues, a National Research Council (NRC) panel says.

The Arrny tasked the panel last year with reviewing the technical and operational plans for facilities and mobile systems designed to destroy non-stockpile weapons, which include munitions dating back to World War 1, munitions that were once buried and are now recovered and experimental chemical-filled munitions. The panel was to make recommendations on the interrelatedness of the technologies and assess the Army's plans for obtaining regulatory approval and for enhancing public involvement in the decision-making process. An international treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, requires that these items be destroyed by 2007. Non-stockpile items have been found in at least 22 states and, if stable, are moved to central storage facilities. Unstable munitions, however, must be disposed of where they are found, necessitating the use of mobile destruction technologies and regulatory approval from a host of states.

The panel, in its report titled Systems and Technologiesfor the Treatment of Non-Stockpile Chemical Warfare Materiel, says it stands by previous NRC reports that found "state-of-the art incineration is safe and effective for the destruction of chemical weapons agent and energetics." But the panel says it realizes "that widespread opposition to incineration has led to considerable delays and additional costs. For that reason, it has worked with the Army to help evaluate alternatives to direct incineration."

In the area of regulatory approval and permitting, the report urges the Army to work with regulators on delisting secondary waste streams from hazardous waste regulations. Specifically, the panel says, "In states where secondary waste streams are regulated as acutely hazardous, the Army should work with state regulators to remove the designation 'acutely hazardous.' For neutralents, the Army should work with state regulators to establish de minimis concentrations for the agents in waste streams ... whereby the waste would no longer be considered as being associated with the parent agent waste. Further, the Army and states should consider whether rinsates and cleaning solutions and residuals from the treatment of neutralent should be classified as hazardous waste at all."

The report also makes several recommendations on improving communication with regulators to speed approval of waste disposal permits to test and deploy the technologies.

About 85 percent of all recovered non-stockpile items are stored at Pine Bluff Arsenal, AR, and the Army has begun designing a fixed facility to destroy the items, with the assistance of some mobile systems. But because this is still in the early planning stages, the NRC panel says additional investment is needed. The Army "should develop a detailed, realistic timetable showing how the planned non-stockpile facilities at Pine Bluff Arsenal can achieve the throughput necessary to destroy the stored non-stockpile items by April 2007 and should communicate this timetable to all stakeholders," the report says.

The disposal of chemical projectiles larger than 155mm and 500- and 1,000-pound bombs also present special challenges, the report says. Although such munitions are rarely recovered in the United states, they have been recovered as the result of U.S. activities in at least one foreign country, and it is likely they will be found on U.S. soil in