136th Year... and still on the job!	Sunday June 26, 2005

Working toward conclusion?

Commission could move chem demil work forward

By JOHN NORTON
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

Nearly two decades after the U.S. Army announced plans to destroy its stockpile of chemical weapons, the process could finally start moving again.

The Pueblo Chemical Depot houses mortar and artillery rounds containing 2,611 tons of mustard agent in its earth-covered igloos.

On Wednesday night, Colorado's Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Commission will decide how much support it will give to a revised plan developed by prime contractor Bechtel that will shave nearly $1 billion from the lifetime cost of the Pueblo project.

The new plan will mean fewer jobs than Bechtel's original design and probably will fail to meet the treaty deadline for weapons destruction by two years. But a cheaper program is what the Defense Department wants, claiming that the accelerated plan Bechtel was designing up until getting a stop-work order last fall, far exceeded the amount of money budgeted, even though the department had ordered that the plan be accelerated in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The sticking point is the provision in Congress' original decision to allow alternatives to incineration if the cost could be kept to a comparable figure. The figure the Defense Department came up with was $1.5 billion, adjusted for inflation now to $1.7 billion, and officials are holding the project to that figure even though comparable incinerators have wound up costing much more than that.

On Monday, the Design Options Working Group, a subcommittee of the Colorado CAC, will hold its last meeting to go over its recommendations regarding the cost-cutting options Bechtel has developed.

Those options still include using a water neutralization process to break down the mustard agent. However, unlike Bechtel's original plan, the new options include doing some of the processing of other items off-site.

One option would be to send the wooden packing materials in which the weapons are stored, called dunnage, to a hazardous materials landfill and to ship the energetics stored with the weapons, the bags of powder used as propellant and the fuses and bursters inside the shells, off-site for disposal.

The Design Options Working Group has been amenable to both of those ideas as long as Bechtel can be sure that the dunnage and energetics aren't contaminated with mustard agent. Part of the company's redesign work has been to come up with ways to test those materials. Any dunnage or explosives found to be contaminated can be treated on site, but with equipment much smaller than what Bechtel would have constructed to do all of it. The Army has portable machinery, used at Rocky Flats, that can do that job.

Another issue is the plan to use "enhanced reconfiguration." While the original facility would have taken the weapons apart and treated the energetics and mustard agent all in one process, the plan now is to remove the weapons from the igloos, take out the fuses and bursters and then put the rounds still containing mustard agent back into igloos until they're ready to go to the neutralization plant.

Another option, and still the most controversial one, is a plan to ship the hydrolysate, the water left over from the neutralization process, off-site.

John Klomp

John Klomp, chairman of the CAC, said he doesn't oppose shipping the dunnage and energetics off-site. "That's one we should not fall on our swords for," he said, in making the recommendation to the Defense Department.

Shipping dunnage and energetics out would mean about 20 fewer processing jobs and 100 fewer construction jobs.

Shipping hydrolysate off-site is another matter.

"Hydrolysate is a toxic waste," he said. Besides the loss of about 40 jobs and $30 million in spending, there are political considerations.

Other weapons facilities that have used water neutralization are having trouble shipping out the hydrolysate because states between the Army bases and processing plants are reluctant to have tankers carrying the substance on their highways.

The original plan would have been to treat the hydrolysate with bacteria in a system similar to a municipal sewer plant. The treated water would be recycled back to the neutralization plant.

Bechtel spokesman John Schlatter said that shipping hydrolysate will mean sending 26,000 gallons of water a day out of Pueblo to a treatment facility in another state.

Klomp believes that a case can be made for treating the hydrolysate here and says he believes that sending the dunnage and energetics off site will trim nearly $1 billion from the cost of the plan Bechtel had been developing.

Along with that, he said he's optimistic that the Defense Department will become more flexible on the price tag for the Pueblo project. Last week, senators from Colorado and Kentucky sent a letter to Kenneth Krieg, the new under secretary of defense that oversees the program saying that the cost cap on the Pueblo program and a similar one at the Blue Grass Army Depot near Lexington, Ky., were unreasonable.

Nevertheless, Klomp said that the fight will not be over when Bechtel submits its new proposal and that past disputes over incineration play a part in Pueblo's problems.

When the Army announced in 1986 that it would destroy Pueblo's mustard agent stockpile - plans were already in the works to destroy all chemical weapons some years earlier - it intended to build an incinerator.

Incinerators have been used on Johnston Atoll west of Hawaii, to destroy weapons shipped from Europe, and at the Tooele base in Utah. The Army also has incinerators in Anniston, Ala., Umatilla, Ore., Pine Bluff, Ark., and other locations.

But in the early 1990s public opposition to incineration began to grow and the Army began to look at alternative technologies.

Water neutralization was the favored method among many environmental groups. Movements in Pueblo and Kentucky pushed for the method and in 2002, the Colorado General Assembly endorsed using the method.

That was important because of the state environmental permits that would be needed. And because of the plan to use water neutralization the Pueblo program has passed through state permitting faster than any other program, until the Defense Department stepped in last fall to stop work.

At the time, Bechtel was 60 percent of the way through designing the plant here. That facility would have had three processing lines and all of the processing would have been done on site, based on the earlier Defense Department instructions to accelerate the program. Because Bechtel was working on an accelerated plan almost from the start, the company had no fallback design it could pull out based on the original $1.5 billion project.

One of the first things Bechtel did when it started the redesign was to cut the processing lines back to two as had originally been planned. Most of the work its designers have done since has been centered around the reconfiguration process and assessing the real cost savings in off-site shipments.

Water neutralization has already been used to eliminate the mustard agent at the Aberdeen Proving Ground but Klomp says opposition to the system remains. "They just seem reluctant to admit it works," he said of some Defense Department officials. "I still believe there are some people in power reluctant to look at this method."

And meanwhile, incinerators have had problems of their own. Fires have broken out at Pine Bluff and Umatilla, shutting down work for several days at a time.

Public sessions going over the options will be held Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The schedule is:

Boone Volunteer Fire Department Community Center, 421 First St., Boone, from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday.

McHarg Community Center, 405 Second St., Avondale, 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The CAC meeting will follow at 6 p.m. at the conference center.

LONG ROAD TO CHEM DEMIL

TIMELINE

1986 Army announces plan to destroy all chemical weapons

1992 Chemical weapons destructions delayed until alternative technology can be informally reviewed

May 2002 Colorado General Assembly endorses water neutralization

July 2002 Army OKs water neutralization for Pueblo

December 2002 Bechtel chosen to run chem demil project

September 2003 Army agrees to do all chem wok in Pueblo

September 2004 Groundbreaking ceremonies for demil plant

October 2004 Defense Dept. stops all design work

March 2005 Funds released for Phase 1 work

*Treaty obligations are supposed to be met by 2012.           

CITIZENS' ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Members of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens' Advisory Commission are:

• John Klomp, chairman 
• Anthony Nunez, Pueblo County Commissioner
• Tom Enrietta, Plumbers & Pipefitters 
• Irene Kornelly, citizen member and base realignment and closure specialist 
• John Thatcher, citizen member and local rancher 
• Ross Vincent, citizen member and Sierra Club representative
• Joan Sowinski, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment 
• John Marshall, Governor's office