Chemical weapons create toxic waste nightmare

05 November 2007
Debora MacKenzie
Magazine issue 2628

MEETING in the Hague next week, the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) will celebrate the fact that Albania and the UK have destroyed their last chemical weapons and that India and South Korea are almost done. But there will be an elephant in the room: in their scramble to destroy weapons by a 2012 deadline, Russia and the US, which possess over 95 per cent of the world's chemical weapons, are creating thousands of tonnes of a nasty, toxic residue that they are having trouble disposing of.

"Albania and the UK have destroyed their last chemical weapons."

Chemical weapons can be incinerated directly. But fearing a release of toxic gases, half the American and all the Russian weapons sites are breaking down the lethal molecules by adding alkali, a technique called hydrolysis. This creates a new problem: how to dispose of the resulting toxic soup, known as the hydrolysate.

Paul Walker of disarmament group Global Green in Washington DC says CWC officials have credited Russia with meeting interim destruction deadlines just for hydrolysing weapons. This has encouraged the Russians to focus on that at the expense of working out how to dispose of the hydrolysate. Russia initially wanted to recycle it as feedstock for chemical plants or fertiliser, but Walker says that has now largely been scrapped because it isn't economically viable.

The US, meanwhile, was hoping to incinerate its hydrolysate, but fears of toxic emissions led two incinerators to refuse hydrolysate from the arsenal in Newport, Indiana. Newport is now trucking it across eight states to Texas. Walker says that protests from environmental groups may mean that arsenals in Kentucky and Colorado will likewise have a tough time finding incinerators.

Russia's three weapons destruction plants have a solution: pouring alkali into the barrels or bombs containing the chemical agents, and then leaving the hydrolysate in situ. The problem then is what to do with the hydrolysate. The biggest of the plants - Maradikovsky - hopes to incinerate it, but the incinerator is not yet working. The plant at Shchuch'ye in Siberia will mix hydrolysate with tar and then bury it, which could pollute the ground.