The News Journal 03/05/06

Critics of VX plan 'a lot more comfortable'

The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week it had dropped its main objections to DuPont Co. plans to add nerve agent disposal waste to the lineup of sewage handled at the company's Chambers Works industrial treatment plant.

The operation, near the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, ranks as the nation's largest "treatment for hire" disposal operation for chemically tainted wastewater.

The EPA's announcement that DuPont's treatment plan appeared safe for the river and aquatic life eased some of the objections held by other agencies, including Delaware's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

DNREC's objections had been intense. VX ranks among the nation's deadliest weapon compounds, and has been targeted for global elimination under an international treaty.

But DNREC, which is still reviewing the EPA proposal, said it was reassured by changes to the planned treatment process and by new promises that none of the VX would survive treatment and trickle into the river.

"We're feeling a lot more comfortable" about assurances that the wastes will be free of VX, said DNREC scientist Richard A. Greene. "We expect less than one molecule of VX in 4 million gallons."

In April 2004, the governors of Delaware and New Jersey, Ruth Ann Minner and James E. McGreevey, strongly urged the Army to drop the plans. Delaware's House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution opposing the plan.

DuPont has emphasized the national security benefits of eliminating the 1,269-ton VX stockpile now being neutralized at an Army facility in Newport, Ind. Government reviewers noted the company made major changes to its original proposal for treating up to 4 million gallons of caustic chemical soup left from the neutralization process in Indiana.

The company could make $13.5 million annually during the two- to three-year treatment process, comments from DuPont in mid-2004 indicated.

Greene, one of the leading scientific voices since the late 1990s in exposing sources of toxic PCBs in the Delaware River watershed, cautioned that other studies and permit reviews are pending.

The EPA's findings were forwarded to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where analysts are considering human health risks posed by the Army's plan. A final report is expected to go to the region's congressional delegations in April.

Both sides -- those in favor of treating the material at the DuPont plant and those opposed -- say they want to protect the Delaware River, long on the rebound from centuries of pollution and exploitation.

Industry and fragile ecosystems exist side by side across its depths and along its hundreds of miles of shoreline. It is at once one of the nation's top destinations for oil tankers and a world-class stopover for migratory shorebirds; it once ran through the nation's largest chemical factory but still supports a few small commercial fisheries struggling to survive.

Clyde Roberts, a retired Port Penn fisherman who now manages a weigh station for commercial striped bass catches, said many watermen considered DuPont's plan a shipwreck from the start.

"I don't see one of the commercial fishermen who would be very happy with it," Roberts said. "I'd have to be really convinced, and I haven't been convinced at this point."

The Delaware, which once supported huge commercial fisheries, yielded about $5.5 million in shellfish catches in the 2004 season and about $1.2 million in finfish in 2003, according to the most recent reports available. Although striped bass catches are up, harvests of other species, including weakfish and shad, have fallen to near record lows.

But fishing wasn't on the top of the agenda when DuPont made presentations to a coalition of businesses in the Dover area, trying to get their support.

Dover Rotary Club member Evan Hensley said DuPont focused heavily on safety, security and finance.

"What the guys told us was, if you have a bad wreck on the interstate and the truck spills, you'll kill the grass by the side of the interstate, but that's about it," said Hensley.

"I think it's a safe program. If you just say nerve agent, people get real nervous," said Hensley. "Once they break it down, it's really just a caustic substance; it's not nerve agent any more."

After hearing presentations by DuPont, a coalition of business groups on both sides of the river sent a letter late last year to the governors of Delaware and New Jersey urging consideration of the project. "We believe it is important to remember the connection between our nation's security and the Newport project, and that the plan to treat the Newport wastewater at Chambers Works be objectively considered as a viable way to address a serious national problem," the coalition said.

Several conservation and citizen groups -- locally and in the Midwest -- remain opposed to the project.

"We do not consider the plan safe or acceptable," said Tracy Carluccio, a staffer for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a multistate conservation group based in Pennsylvania. "The jury is still way out on this."

The network said the EPA report left unresolved questions about the cumulative impact of VX-related discharges and other pollution.

Near Newport, a town of about 600 in central Indiana, pipefitter Leonard Akers said the Army should abandon its plan for a DuPont disposal contract and resurrect an earlier disposal plan called super-critical water oxidation, or SCWO. A return to the SCWO process, now dismissed as too expensive and time-consuming by the Army, would destroy the VX in a single step at Newport while leaving only toxic salts that can be landfilled.

Akers, who once worked as a contractor at the Newport disposal plant, said VX was made at the Indiana plant and should be destroyed there.

Critics of DuPont's plan have long argued that the shipments from Newport would carry far more than just a drain-cleaner-like substance.

DuPont plans to immediately treat shipments arriving from Newport to eliminate thiolamine, a chemical that creates a "skunk-like" odor and one of three compounds needed to reconstitute VX. Even after the breakdown, other chemicals will remain, including a common chemical used in oven cleaners called sodium hydroxide, and several phosphorus compounds including some that can be used to reassemble VX.

Another chemical, diisopropylamine, forced the shutdown of the VX neutralization process last year after it turned up in unexpected amounts in the already treated wastewater at Newport, making the plant's output too flammable to ship. Engineers quickly revised the system to siphon off the diisopropylamine.

"I don't think it's wise at all to be transporting this stuff," Akers said. "We don't want to ship it off somewhere else, they don't want to receive it, and I don't think very many people in the middle have been notified that it's coming through."

New Jersey last year banned use of its state turnpike to move truckloads of VX disposal waste to Chambers Works. The state also barred the company from handling any of the waste without a change to its state discharge permit -- a potentially time-consuming process that could involve public comment and hearings.

Approval also will be needed from the regional Delaware River Basin Commission, a group with voting members from Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and the federal government.

DuPont's plant already processes 220,000 gallons of industrial wastes daily from around the country, as well as millions of gallons of Chambers Works' waste and wastewater from big New Jersey plants.

The company markets its industrial waste services nationally, while treating waste liquids oozing out of hazardous waste landfills and cleanup sites.

The plant's treated wastewater empties into the Delaware River on Delaware's side of the boundary, emerging from an underwater pipe 50 yards beyond the shoreline.

The border-straddling pipeline put Delaware squarely in the middle of the debate.

"We were the ones who stood on the tracks and said, 'Time out.' There's some substantial issues here that have not been answered," said Greene, who provided DNREC officials with reports that led to Gov. Ruth Ann Minner's decision to oppose the earlier DuPont proposal.

DuPont subsequently developed an alternative that will make phosphorus compounds drop out of the wastewater, allowing disposal in the company's hazardous waste landfill at Chambers Works.

The company also recently proposed a $3.5 million upgrade, including new piping systems that will spread out the release points, reducing concentrations at any single point in the river.

Greene said DuPont's innovations for the VX project may have much wider uses in controlling phosphorus pollution from wastewater discharges. He also said that the Army and DuPont have answered and largely ruled out concerns that VX residues will emerge from the Newport site.

Other factors may determine the fate of the project, Greene said. "The people will speak on this."

Thomas argued that DuPont's proposal would work against a trend that has seen gradual improvement in the river and a recovery of some fish species that once supported a huge industry.

"When I was a kid, you could swim in the water and you'd come out with a moustache and brown underwear," Thomas said after returning from a morning on riverside marshes. "There's no question that the river has improved, but the more we put in there, the more we hurt it. You can go up that river in the dark in the morning and you can smell it."