LOCAL

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Incineration plant puts it all together for test run

By AMYJO BROWN of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com



An employee at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility makes his way through the upper level of the chemical weapons incinerator plant. It is here where rockets filled with GB, or sarin nerve agent, will be fed into the incinerators once operations begin in July. Staff photo by AmyJo Brown
UMATILLA — Integrated Plant Runs, the phrase for the next-to-last stage of preparation for incineration of weapons at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, started Monday.

IPRs mean the plant will run all systems at once in order to test its continuous operation, as opposed to running systems individually for testing, which is what has been done until now.

Rockets with simulated GB or sarin nerve agent — a substance similar to anti-freeze — are being used in place of the real thing.

“This is the first time we are putting it all together,” said Rick Kelley, a spokesperson for the Washington Demilitarization Company, the contractor which built and will operate the incineration plant. “Everything will be going at once, from accepting the munitions from the Army to disposing of the byproducts after incineration.”

For more than half a century, the depot has stored about 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapon supply, including 3,717 tons of nerve and blister agents contained in munitions. They must be destroyed according to an international treaty signed in the 1980s. Incineration is scheduled to begin in July.

The public probably won’t notice the increased activity this week, Kelley said, which is how the process should work this summer as well.

The IPRs will run five consecutive days for eight hours a day.

About 100 rockets were fed into three incinerators Tuesday in the same process that will be used when incineration begins, according to Kelley. They were processed at a rate of 15 an hour.

“From the debriefing we received, everything went as planned,” said Dennis Murphey, administrator of the chemical demilitarization program for the state Department of Environmental Quality, which oversees the depot’s activities.

Murphey said a DEQ representative will be on site sporadically this week, but the DEQ will be even more involved in the next phase of the process.

When the IPRs are completed, an evaluation will be done by the contractor and then the facility will prepare for an Integrated Operations Demonstration, in which the same process is followed except this time emergency situations will be introduced. This will last 10 consecutive days, from March 31 to April 9.

If the plant’s contractor OKs the process at the end of this step, the company will announce its readiness to begin incineration. The plant must then go through a final approval process with the Army and DEQ

Afterward, recommendations will be sent to the state’s Environmental Quality Commission, which must give the final OK before the plant can begin full operations.

The process

•Army removes rockets from storage igloos and transports them to nearby incineration plant.

•Rockets are taken to the Container Handling Building, which will stockpile up to 48 rockets at once.

•Rockets moved to Unpacked Area, where each container will be tested for leaking agent. Leakers will be handled last in the incineration process.

•If no leaks are detected, the containers will be opened and the rockets will be removed by fork lift and taken to the rocket metering machine.

•Two employees will unload the rockets and put them on the rocket metering machine. It is the only time in the process where employees at the depot will come into direct contact with the munitions (the rest of the process is done with robotics).

•The machine will transport the rockets to the next phase, the furnaces and the destruction of the weapons.