Deseret News
August 27, 2003

PCB reading puzzles managers of incinerator; Army awaiting new analysis on contaminant

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

Managers of the Army's chemical weapons incinerator are scratching their heads over strange results of a test burn.
      
The plant, located near Stockton, Tooele County, was going through trial burns of its ability to safely destroy the chemical warfare agent VX. First on the schedule of VX armaments to be burned are M55 rockets and their shipping and firing tubes.
      
According to a Web site maintained by the Federation of American Scientists, the M55 was produced in the late 1950s. The version using VX nerve agent carried 10 pounds of the substance, of which a tiny drop on the skin could kill a person.
     
The rocket is 78 inches long and 4.4 inches across and weighs 57 pounds, the federation says. Figures announced earlier by the Army indicate that Deseret Chemical Depot, where the incinerator is located, stores 3,966 M55 rockets containing 39,660 pounds of VX.
      
The depot stores 2.7 million pounds of VX in ton containers, spray tanks, M56 rocket warheads, M55 rockets, mines and projectiles, the Army indicated in the earlier statement. (More recently, detailed information was not released as it is classified.)
      
Preparing for the M55 campaign, the incinerator has been undergoing tests of its equipment. One concern was to see whether it could safely handle polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly called PCBs.
      
PCBs once were used in many industrial applications, from lubrication to electrical insulators to fiberglass. Eventually, the chemicals were banned as they are extremely toxic and can cause health problems.
      
Besides the VX nerve agent carried by the rockets, the plant must burn the rockets' fiberglass shipping and firing tubes. PCBs are known to be in the fiberglass, so the plant needs the ability to safely handle PCBs.
      
A baseline reading had to be established to show what the air was like around the plant and in the furnace when no PCB material was being burned. Air was sampled around the facility as was the incinerator outflow when pure natural gas was burned.
      
The baseline reading was expected to show no PCBs present. Next, small known quantities of PCBs would be burned while technicians checked to see how the equipment functioned.
      
When trial burns began about a month ago, some strange results showed up.
      
"The air with just natural gas in the furnace, not burning anything, had high levels of PCBs," said Chuck Sprague, spokesman for Deseret Chemical Depot. Or so the test equipment seemed to indicate.
      
The monitors should have said no PCBs were present, to 99.9999 percent accuracy. Instead, they showed a reading of 99.9984 percent.
      
If that is correct, it would mean PCB contamination was present — before the plant burned M55 rocket shipping and firing tubes containing PCBs.
      
A new analysis to determine what caused these readings has been carried out and the plant is awaiting the results. They could come soon, Sprague said.
      
If some difficult problem prevented ordinary processing of the M55 shipping and launch tubes, the rockets could be taken out and burned in tubes from a later era, when fiberglass was not employed. Or perhaps the tubes could be processed extremely slowly, in order to catch all the contaminants.
      
Sooner or later the tubes will have to be destroyed in the incinerator. They cannot be shipped to a commercial hazardous waste operation because of the possibility that leaking VX might have contaminated the tubes.
      
But Sprague believes the strange readings will be traced to some glitch, not actual PCB levels in the plant's air, because material containing PCBs hasn't been burned.
      
"You just don't have loose PCBs floating around," he said.