RICHMOND - Delays in funding for a chemical neutralization plant at Blue Grass Army Depot mean the United States will probably miss a treaty deadline for destruction of its chemical weapons, members of a local advisory board were told yesterday.
The group also discussed 10 potential changes in design or destruction processes that are being studied to fulfill a Pentagon directive to cut costs at the $2 billion plant.
In January, the Pentagon asked the Army to study potentially less-costly alternatives to building the plant, such as transporting the weapons to other disposal sites. After pressure from U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and others in Congress, the Pentagon agreed Friday to release money it had been withholding from the project and shelved the transportation concept, at least for now. The money should enable work to continue through September 2006.
Although the money has been released, cost-cutting measures are still being sought. Officials haven't determined how much the changes might save.
Some of the changes are simple, such as moving fences so more of the plant's buildings are in less-restricted areas. This will make it easier and cheaper to hire workers.
But one is potentially unpopular: a proposal to ship hydro-lysates -- the chemical compounds left over after munitions are chemically decomposed and neutralized -- out of state instead of destroying them at the depot. Officials didn't say yesterday where the waste material might be shipped.
Current plans call for the hydrolysates to be destroyed by supercritical water oxidation, a sort of technologically advanced pressure cooker. But the five units needed will cost about $10 million apiece, so project officials are analyzing the cost benefits and risks of shipping.
The plant is expected to produce about 6 million gallons of hydrolysates. The mix of water, the industrial chemical thiodi-glycol, salts, metals and organic compounds would fill about 300 rail cars or 2,500 trucks.
Transporting hydrolysate to another state for treatment and disposal is not as risky as moving the chemical weapons themselves, something the Army had been studying until last week. But an Army plan to truck hydrolysate from Newport, Ind., to a DuPont Inc. plant in New Jersey, process it and discharge it in the Delaware River has drawn strong opposition in New Jersey and Delaware.
The Madison County plant is being redesigned and is expected to be about 25 percent smaller, so it can be built more quickly. To further reduce costs, officials also are expected to:
• Cut the number of supercritical water oxidation units from five to four, provided trans-portation of hydrolysate is ruled out.
• Use forklifts instead of conveyors and overhead cranes to move the weapons to the area where they will be neutralized.
The redesign will slow down the project by a full year, however. The current design was 60 percent complete in February; the redesign won't be 60 percent done until next February.
This means that unless the changes being studied can make up some of the lost time, the 523 tons of nerve and mustard agent stored at the depot won't be destroyed by April 2012, said Chris Midgett, project manager for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, the contractor.
That is the treaty deadline for destruction of the world's chemical weapons stockpiles. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, formally called the Chemical Weapons Convention, in 1997.