136th Year... and still on the job!	Tuesday June 21, 2005

Chem demil design group urged to balance concerns

If changes are OK'd, Bechtel can start designing plant needed to destroy tons of mustard agent.

Community members working on recommendations for how to proceed with the destruction of chemical weapons here continued on Monday to balance the need to get the project moving against their own concerns that they didn't have enough information to make their decisions.

The Design Options Working Group will meet again next Monday to approve a final draft of its recommendations on the alternatives that have been put forward to bring down the price of the weapons destruction program.

Those recommendations will be forwarded to the state's Community Advisory Commission, which meets a week from Wednesday.

Bechtel, the prime contractor for the project, has been working for the last few months to find ways to keep the program within a $1.7 billion lifetime cost prescribed by the Defense Department.

The changes have to be done by the end of the month and submitted, along with recommendations from the community group, to the Chemical Materials Agency which then will ask for approval from recently appointed Under Secretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg.

If Krieg approves the new plan, Bechtel can get back to work on designing the plant that will be used to destroy 2,800 tons of mustard agent artillery and mortar shells at the Pueblo Chemical Depot.

Members of the the design options group have complained for several weeks that the changes made in Bechtel's original plan, which would have destroyed everything on site, leave too many unanswered questions.

That has been made clear in the draft recommendations developed so far.

The Bechtel redesign centers around shipping some things out of Pueblo for treatment elsewhere while doing the basic water neutralization of the mustard agent here.

The three items that would be sent off-site would be: dunnage, the wood pallets and crates used to store the weapons; energetics, the propellants, fuses and bursters; and the agent hydrolysate, the contaminated water left over after the neutralization process.

The dunnage, as long as it was not contaminated by mustard agent from leaking shells, would be taken to special hazardous waste landfills. The group appears ready to go along with that as long as a satisfactory method of testing for mustard agent contamination is developed.

The same reservation has been expressed for shipping energetics to another location but the draft recommendation points out that even less information has been made available about how those substances will be tested.

Group member Terry Hart suggested that the Army be urged to study recycling of the energetics for use by the mining industry.

That prompted a warning from other group members that the group should not add more conditions that could give the Defense Department any reason to delay the project for more studies.

John Klomp, chairman of the CAC and a member of the design options group had made a similar recommendation, telling the group that it needed to leave some "negotiating room."

Complaining about a lack of information would only give some officials in the Pentagon an excuse to keep the project on hold, he warned.

Another aspect of the energetics option that has raised questions is a plan to disassemble the weapons to remove the explosives but then put the shells with mustard agent back into storage until it's time to neutralize it. Originally, the shells would have gone through one smooth process of disassembly and water neutralization.

Hart agreed to a less stringent recommendation that recycling be considered.

The biggest impact on the program is the recommendation to ship the hydrolysate off-site for treatment. Bechtel's original plan called for bacterial treatment and recycling of water, something that also would mean more jobs. The group's latest draft report listed job loss as the top concern and it was suggested that while that may be a big issue locally, it wasn't a good argument to make to Pentagon planners.

The group agreed to give priority to its concerns about political obstacles to shipping hydrolysate.