By AL MASCITTI
04/01/2004

Every news story about the U.S. Army's plan for disposing of its stockpile of VX nerve agent includes one scary sentence: "One drop of VX on exposed human skin causes death within minutes."

The Army and the DuPont Co., which would like to treat the neutralized chemical at the company's Chambers Works in Deepwater, N.J., prefer to emphasize the positive: What eventually reaches the river, they claim, will be about as toxic as table salt.

The risks involved in the plan lie somewhere between those extremes. The nerve agent will be chemically altered before it leaves the stockpile in Indiana, so nobody en route faces death by droplets of chemical weaponry. By the same token, hydrolysate - the stuff VX is broken down into, and the form in which it would be shipped cross-country - is more like oven cleaner than table salt.

It's only after treatment at Chambers Works that the resulting product reaches the "safe as table salt" stage, and it's still not something I want to sprinkle on my fish and chips.

Of course, if I catch that fish in the Delaware River, I'm not supposed to eat it anyway, because it's full of heavy metals and toxic compounds like PCBs, partly from decades of releases by DuPont and other companies.

So if the Army and DuPont can be trusted - a significant "if," considering that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already has accused the company of misstating that agency's assessment of the risks - the disposal of millions of gallons of salty water will have minimal impact on an already-compromised ecosystem.

A few critics with expertise in chemistry aren't nearly so blasé. They point out that some of the chemicals formed by the breakdown of VX have scarcely been studied.

Delaware's environmental regulators are worried the effluent will increase algae formation.

It takes some chemistry expertise to weigh these arguments, so I have a simpler one: What's in it for us?

The Army gets to dispose of this killer chemical as fast as possible. DuPont gets a boost to its bottom line. What do Delawareans get, except an ever-dirtier river?

Chambers Works is licensed to discharge millions of gallons of water containing various chemical compounds. As DuPont's production in Deepwater has dwindled, more of that capacity is available for contract work. Already the company is using the plant to treat and dispose of another chemical weapon, the mustard gas stored at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

When the permits were granted, such pollution was the trade-off New Jersey and Delaware residents accepted in exchange for thousands of chemical industry jobs. Now the jobs are gone, but the use of the Delaware River as the chemical industry's sewer goes on.

If DuPont really wants this contract, our elected officials should strike a hard bargain - demand the company clean up the PCBs in the watershed, for example.

Rather than oppose the contract on fear of the unknown, the public should employ a negotiating tactic the business executives at DuPont should understand: Give us something in return.

Al Mascitti's opinion column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.