136th Year... and
still
on the job!
Friday November 18,
2005
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136th Year... and
still
on the job!
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Friday November 18,
2005
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A plan to destroy the Blue Grass Army Depot's chemical weapons stockpile through a water-neutralization process has gotten high marks from the National Research Council.
In January, the NRC released a similar, positive report on the water neutralization plan for the Pueblo Chemical Depot.
The report on the Blue Grass project, released this week, only warned that the project timeline may be unrealistic because of possible complications in opening up the rockets there that contain nerve agent. The Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives agency has been working for several months on that issue after fires related to propellants inside the rockets were reported at other facilities.
That's one problem not faced at the Pueblo Chemical Depot where 780,000 artillery shells and mortar rounds are due to be destroyed. The propellants for those weapons are stored along with the shells but are not part of the units. Also, bursters inside the weapons are made to be removed and will be taken out before the shells are taken to the neutralization facility.
The plan is to ship the explosives to another location for destruction, something local officials opposed.
While incineration was the Army's preferred method for weapons destruction and is being used at several other bases, Pueblo and Blue Grass, Ky., plan to use an environmentally-friendly water neutralization process. The Army has already successfully used water neutralization to destroy the Aberdeen Proving Ground's mustard agent, which was stored in drums but the process at Blue Grass and Pueblo will be more complicated because the mustard agent is inside individual weapons.
Kathy DeWeese, spokeswoman for the ACWA program, said that the agency plans to work closely with the NRC as the two projects go on. She pointed out that the information in this week's report was based on data collected through last February. "We're actually going to be working a lot more closely with them in Pueblo and also at the Blue Grass project," she said. "We'd like to get real-time feedback."
While initial design work on both facilities is continuing, the Army has yet to decide what it will do with the hydrolysate, the contaminated water left over from the neutralization process.
The original plan for Pueblo was to treat it on site with bacteria so that the water could be recycled back into the neutralization plant. That was one of the ideas that appeared to be scrapped when prime contractor Bechtel had to redo its plans to bring the project back to the original $1.7 billion budgeted for the lifetime of the program.
The Colorado Citizens Advisory Commission recommended on-site treatment and the NRC report points out that plans to ship hydrolysate from a weapons destruction plant in Indiana to DuPont's Deepwater, N.J., disposal facility are running into opposition from areas through which it would travel.
The DuPont plant handled the Aberdeen hydrolysate but it was relatively close by in New Jersey.
Bechtel has been told to design the Pueblo facility with an option for on-site destruction and DeWeese said that there should be a decision on which way to go by early 2007.
Ross Vincent, a member of the Colorado Community Advisory Commission representing the Sierra Club, said that he doubts the government will be able ship either the hydrolysate or explosives out of Pueblo.
He bases that on the problems the Army's facing in trying to move the hydrolysate from nerve agent weapons being destroyed at the Newport, Ind., Depot to DuPont's Deepwater facility. The Army has already been blocked from shipping the hydrolysate to a facility in Dayton, Ohio, and even though the Centers for Disease Control has signed off on the transportation plan to New Jersey, opposition continues from Indiana locals and from New Jersey officials.
Ironically, Vincent's father once worked at Deepwater and he himself had summer jobs there.
Of the plan to ship Pueblo's hydrolysate, he said, "It's not going to be easy and I won't be surprised if they find themselves in the same situation."
While the Army sees a cost-saving in off-site treatment, he believes it could be more cost-effective in the long run to treat the hydrolysate here. "It would be interesting to know what the comparative costs would be for what they've gone through in Indiana to what it would have cost to do it on site," he said.
Vincent said he even doubts that the Army will be able to ship the Pueblo explosives off-site, even if officials claim they are not contaminated with mustard agent because of the public perception of anything linked to chemical weapons.
While the plan now is to do that, he said he's concerned if the project managers find they can't ship out the explosives, they'll be stuck with having to use a small unit that will be brought in for the relatively limited number of contaminated propellants "and we'll be blowing up explosives out there for years."