Eugene Weekly
November 12, 2002

Chemical Weapons Incineration Trial

By Mary O'Brian, PhD

During the last days of election campaigning, I was not present to help those who were working day and night to retain some semblance of checks and balances in our government. I was instead working day and night on a previous commitment to serve as an expert witness in a state trial that turned out to coincide with the election. The trial concerns how the U.S. Army will dispose of one tiny portion of our nation's prodigious arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

If you drive east toward Hermiston on Highway 84 beyond the Columbia River Gorge, you see miles of dirt "igloos" north of the highway. They shelter more than 200,000 rockets, bombs, mines, spray tanks and ton containers of mustard gas and two nerve gases, VX and GB. Under an international treaty, signatory countries agreed to destroy their chemical weapons, and the U.S. has eight such weapon sites. (Meanwhile, the U.S. is free to produce new kinds of weapons of mass destruction.)

The Army wants to incinerate these weapons, and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Washington Demilitarization Company (the incinerator corporation) are defending this incineration in court. The Army pays for the DEQ staff who oversee the Army's incineration, estimate its risks, and defend it in court.

One big problem is that incinerating the metal- and chlorine-containing weapons sends toxic metals (e.g., mercury and lead) and some nerve gas into the air, and produces and similarly lofts harmful microscopic particulates, dioxins, furans, and several hundred other chlorinated toxics into the air. It also produces contaminated water and ash. To boot, the incinerators don't work well. (Nerve gas weapons were first incinerated on a Pacific island; and now in Utah. Big Problems keep cropping up.)

The lead plaintiff is GASP, a Hermiston area citizens' group. The Chemical Weapons Working Group, a national citizens' organization in Kentucky, provides support. For ten years, GASP members have been showing DEQ that neutralization of the chemical weapons is a better alternative than incineration. Neutralization breaks down nerve gases in warm water and sodium hydroxide; and recycles most of it, using far less water than incineration. Recently, neutralization has been chosen for Colorado, Indiana, and Maryland chemical weapons sites; and it will soon be chosen in Kentucky.

When the Army asked Oregon DEQ for an incineration permit in the late 1980s, DEQ did what it knows best: it wrote a permit. GASP members immediately objected. The incinerator has now been built, but is currently shut down because it sent too much lead into the air during its first two trial burns. ("Too much" is relative: The smallest concentrations of lead cause damage to a developing embryo's brain.).

GASP is asking the court to revoke the incineration permit for several reasons, including misrepresentation by the Army that the process would work as they were proposing; and that it will cause unnecessary harm. By Oregon law, the DEQ is required to select the technology that provides the "maximum possible protection."

As the last of the plaintiffs' witnesses, I listened for eight days to the first nine witnesses. They included a person who once was in charge of obtaining permit approval for weapons incineration in Utah (the process wasn't honest); a person who explained neutralization in simple English; a toxicologist who explained why certain incinerator toxics and particulates cause harm at any exposure; and an Oregon Health Sciences University public health professor who showed how permitting incineration does not follow public health principles. The judge is remarkable for his unflagging attention.

I then testified two and a half days. My task was to critique the incinerator risk assessment and help show that if the DEQ had considered neutralization alongside incineration, they could never have opted to harm people and wildlife with dioxins, heavy metals, and particulates.

The trial will continue for weeks. A revocation request places a high hurdle in front of a win, so I don't know what the outcome will be. I do know that public process and community and environmental health in our nation depend on (1) laws such as those requiring "maximum possible protection;" (2) the appointment of judges who are not idealogues; and (3) administrations that honor democracy more than money.

So much can be lost so quickly. There is room for so many to help.