Battle Continues Over Chemical Weapons Incineration

By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Fourteen years after the United States began destroying its chemical weapons by incineration, environmental activists continue to push the federal government to dispose of all remaining materials with an alternative technology (see GSN, Sept. 22).

Lawsuits are still in play to stop incineration now under way at sites in Oregon and Alabama. Another suit would halt work at all four U.S. chemical weapons incinerators.

Away from the courts, citizen activist organizations such as the Chemical Weapons Working Group and GASP maintain an ongoing campaign to focus the attention of legislators and the public to the issue. Even if the groups cannot win the war, they hope to extract smaller victories from the government.

Each lawsuit or press release is a chance for critics to explain the perceived environmental and safety dangers of burning and for the U.S. Army to respond with details of the elaborate safety measures it has taken to ensure no dangerous materials escape a facility.

“Combustion … is a very polluting approach,” said Craig Williams of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group. “It releases hundreds of toxic compounds as part of its operation, even when it works as designed.”

“There are so many safety features built into these facilities … that they are safe as safe can be,” counters Mike Abrams, spokesman for the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Alabama. “We cannot afford to be hogtied by fear. We have to do something to reduce the danger presented by the storage of chemical weapons.”

Under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, the United States has until 2007 to destroy its chemical weapons, with an option to request a five-year extension to 2012.

The Army began looking at options in the 1970s to destroy 30,000 tons of sarin, VX, mustard, blister and nerve agents contained in rockets, artillery, mortars, land mines and bulk containers. Officials selected incineration in 1987 for its capability to destroy the agent and explosives and to decontaminate metal pieces, said Jeff Lindblad, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency.

From 1990 to 2000, the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System burned more than 4 million pounds of nerve and blister agents and 412,732 munitions and containers on a small spit of land 800 miles southwest of Hawaii.

Plans originally called for chemical weapons stored at eight sites on the continental United States to be incinerated at facilities near the storage depots. Incinerators are now operating at Anniston, Tooele, Utah, and Umatilla, Ore., with a fourth to begin disposal next year at Pine Bluff, Ark.

Something, however, happened on the way to full incineration. In the 1990s, public concerns about incinerators led Congress to direct the Army to consider alternate forms of disposal. The Chemical Materials Agency relented to the pressure, eventually selecting neutralization for four sites where incinerators were not yet being built — Edgewood, Md.; Newport, Ind.; Blue Grass, Ky.; and Pueblo, Colo.

It was a victory for opponents of incineration, but Lindblad said changing technologies in midstream should not significantly increase the anticipated $24 billion price tag or slow the schedule of disposal.

“We will use the best technologies,” he said. “Both the technologies work and they work well.”

While they accept neutralization, Chemical Materials Agency officials have not backed off their belief in the safety of incineration.

Anniston has three furnaces — one each for rockets, artillery and chemical agent removed from the munitions. The facility has destroyed nearly 43,000 rockets filled with sarin since operations began in August 2003 (see GSN, Nov. 2).

Weapons and agent go separately through a furnace and then a 2,000-degree afterburner. Flames decontaminate metal shells, which are later collected for recycling. All that remains of the chemical agent and other weapons parts are ash and condensation that are chilled to 140 degrees to avoid creating toxic furans.

Each furnace contains a pollution abatement system to keep debris and condensation from entering the exhaust stack. Brine from the system is shipped to a landfill, mixed with cement and buried.

Remaining exhaust from the furnaces goes through charcoal filters to stop any chemical agent from escaping through the exhaust stack. Monitors have been placed in the stack to detect agent particles, Abrams said.

The safety equipment is largely the same at all four incinerators, though Tooele does not have the charcoal filters, Abrams said.

Studies of the Johnston Atoll incinerator during a trial burn found that it released fewer toxic dioxins into the air than a diesel truck moving at 40 mph. The dioxin toxicity level from the Johnston stack over a year was equivalent to smoking 1.7 to 17 cigarettes over that same time period, according to a 1995 report by environmental engineer Harvey Rogers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“For heavy metals and dioxins, our examinations to date have shown emission levels to be safe. In fact, the dioxin emission levels for the Army incinerators have typically been among the lowest we have seen for all types of incinerators,” Rogers said in another CDC document.

Exhaust from the Anniston facility is cleaner than what was found at Johnston Atoll, Abrams said.

Opponents and observers have different takes on incineration, with Williams describing both the process and the outcome as deeply flawed.

There have been 18 documented releases of chemical agent into the environment since 1986 at incinerators, Williams said. Most releases came out an exhaust stack, though a few happened inside the facility, said Paul Walker, director of the Legacy program at Global Green USA, an organization dedicated to eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

Chemical Materials Agency spokesman Greg Mahall charged that “creative accounting” was used to develop those figures, noting that incineration did not begin until 1990. The most significant agent release, at Tooele, dissipated “to no effects within 50 feet or so of the stack,” he said in an e-mail message.

The two camps, not surprisingly, dispute many points regarding incinerator safety. Abrams said trial burns at Anniston almost uniformly identified more than 93 percent of materials emitted from the exhaust stack. Williams said the Army’s list of substances fails to include hundreds of materials, and placed the amount of identified substances at 20 percent.

“For the other 80 percent they don’t know what it is, they assume it’s not harmful,” he said. “That is absolutely insane.”

Thousands of tons of “potentially polluting” gases are released from incinerator stacks each day, Walker said. Monitors do not check for substances such as mercury, lead and heavy metals, he said. Expelled amounts of the materials were within permitted limits during trial burns, Abrams said.

Incinerator operators also do not have to consider the existing environmental situation in their communities when burning, Williams said. For example, Anniston has a history of contamination of potentially harmful PCBs, .28 grams of which Abrams said were released during the total elimination of sarin rockets.

Chemical agent monitors in exhaust stacks and at depot perimeters regularly sound false alarms, which could slow human reaction in the event of an actual release, Walker said.

Neutralization is safer for the environment and workers, Williams said: there is no exhaust to be released into the atmosphere, the process allows for greater control of disposal and batches of agent can be treated more than once if the first run-through does not achieve sufficient destruction.

The process is already under way in Maryland, where chemical agent is drained from 1-ton containers and mixed with hot water in industrial reactors for neutralization. Similar procedures are planned for nonweaponized chemicals in Indiana and agents contained in munitions at Kentucky and Colorado.

Neutralization isn’t without its own troubles. Plans to ship waste created by the process at the Newport facility in Indiana for processing at a plant in New Jersey have met fierce resistance from officials in Delaware and New Jersey who worry about pollutants being dumped into the Delaware River after the final treatment (see GSN, April 9).

Neutralization is the technology of choice in Russia, the world’s other major owner of chemical weapons. Russia plans to neutralize more than 40,000 tons of chemical weapons at seven sites, Walker said.

Destruction methods have not been selected for much smaller stockpiles in Libya and Albania, Walker said. The final two countries with acknowledged stockpiles under the Chemical Weapons Convention — India and South Korea — have not said how or where they are eliminating their munitions.

Opponents over the years have filed more than 20 lawsuits to halt incineration at U.S. sites, CMA spokesman Mahall said in an interview with Global Security Newswire. None have yet succeeded. “So far I think our record holds up that we’re being protective,” he said.

The most recent battleground has been at Umatilla, where opponents unsuccessfully sought to block operations in September. The Oregon Appeals Court last month rejected an injunction request against the Umatilla incinerator, and indicated it expects the lawsuit by burning opponent GASP to eventually fail (see GSN, Sept. 22).

Meanwhile, the Chemical Weapons Working Group and other plaintiffs expect a trial early next year in their lawsuit to stop work at Anniston.

Williams said he understands the chances of winning at trial: “To be pragmatic about it, I would say that it is less than even.”

Legal cases have value even if they fail to close incinerators, Williams said. An Oregon Circuit Court judge in July refused to revoke the operating permit for the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, he said, but ordered the state to increase protection for whistleblowers in the facility’s operating permit and required additional agent alarms to be placed in the incinerator building.

The dispute over incineration also occurs in the court of public opinion. Each facility has an outreach office in a nearby community. Interested citizens can come in to ask questions or read reports, while local groups can request speakers to make presentations on the facility.

“[It is] one-stop shopping for folks coming in for information on the program,” Lindblad said. “Anything that anyone wants to know about, they can go to that office and get that information.”

Opponents, lacking the financial support of the U.S. government, take a more grass-roots approach to making their case. The Chemical Weapons Working Group Web site tracks developments at U.S. disposal facilities, and contains a link to Learning Not to Burn, a publication that details the risks of burning waste and offers instruction on organizing against incinerators.

The organization continues to seek improved monitoring at all chemical weapons storage and disposal sites, increased protection for workers and whistleblowers and more information on site operations for nearby communities, Williams said.

While he sympathized with the concerns expressed by Williams and other incinerator opponents, chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker said the priority must remain on destroying the U.S. stockpiles. That means using the existing incinerators rather than slowing the program to adopt new technology at those locations.

“For the areas that have already built incinerators at huge investment, I think we should go ahead and destroy the stocks,” said Tucker, a senior researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “If we delay any more we could miss the 2012 deadline, which would set a very bad precedent for other countries” (see GSN, Nov. 3).

Walker agreed that the incinerators are not likely to be shut down at this point. There are other options, he said.

Mario Fiori, former assistant Army secretary for installations and the environment, briefly discussed constructing a neutralization facility at Umatilla alongside the depot’s incinerator, Walker said. “Doubling up” would allay some safety fears and speed the disposal process, he said. Depot spokeswoman Mary Binder said the discussion was limited to one public meeting in March 2002: “That never went anywhere.”

Even if the battle seems lost, there is still work to be done, said Rufus Kinney, spokesman for Families Concerned About Nerve Gas Incineration, a group that formed in the early 1990s against the Anniston incinerator.

In September 2002, the organization drew more than 350 people to a march against the facility. Burning began less than a year later, and even the group’s core membership has dropped to almost nothing, Kinney acknowledged.

“It’s hard to keep up the same level of enthusiasm and commitment that I had for so long because they’re burning and they’re not going to stop burning,” said Kinney, who lives in nearby Jacksonville.

The organization helped press for safety equipment at residences and school in the area of the incinerator as it became clear that burning would occur, Kinney said. He said he still uses contacts with government officials and the press, letters to the editors and other means to press for improved monitoring at the incinerator and for better public access to information on the facility’s daily operations.

After 10 years of fighting the incinerator, Pine Bluff for Safe Disposal Executive Director Evelyn Yates is focusing on improving community preparedness ahead of the Arkansas facility’s expected opening in February. 

Families dealing with their daily issues might not have time to plan for an emergency, and lessons could easily be forgotten in the chaos of a chemical agent release, Yates said. She hopes to develop a program to train local students to inform their families and the community on the strategies prepared by the Arkansas Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program.

Yates also would like to see an independent monitor set up for the site, to ensure the public knows what it coming out of the exhaust stack.

“We fought for years to stop it and it’s in our face,” she said. “We just have to find ways to make sure the facility will be safe.”