Richmond Register
February 8, 2002

Local group tours Army Post

by LUKE BRADSHAW
Register News Writer

Several residents of Madison County were given the opportunity to see a potential solution to a problem that has been debated for some time as they toured the Aberdeen Chemical Agent Neutralization Facility in Maryland.

The problem sits in the igloos at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond. The chemical weapons stored there may be the last to be destroyed in the United States, however, being last is not necessarily a bad thing.

Jim Richmond, a representative of the U.S. Army's Chemical Demilitarization Program said there is an advantage to learning from previous experiences.

"You can always learn a hell of a lot more from mistakes," said Mike Parker, the program manager of ACWA. "Your ego wants to get in the way of mistakes sometimes."

Several local residents spent Thursday touring the ACANF at both the Aberdeen site as well as the Edgewood site, including Citizens' Advisory Committee members Charles Douglas Hindman, Amanda Stafford and Diane Kerby; Richmond City Commissioner Mike Brewer and Bill Strong; BGAD and Blue Grass Chemical Activity personnel Dave Easter and Maj. John Riley; Amy Conner of the Blue Grass Outreach Office; and ACWA dialogue member Elizabeth Crowe. In the tour they saw several alternatives to incineration.

Two neutralization technologies are proposed for the BGAD. In both, the Agent and energetics are neutralized. Then they are either destroyed or hydrolyzed with water, as is
the case with mustard Agent, or caustic sodium hydroxide, which is used for the nerve agents GB and VX.

Mustard agent would be optimum for this process because when added to boiling water, it almost instantly dissolves. The end product is essentially sodium chloride or salt water.

The group from Madison County saw this process first-hand although on a much smaller scale than if :it were implemented for the BGAD to eradicate chemical agents. The provisions for safety were in place for all of those taking the tour and included an escape mask with a miniature oxygen tank and a nerve agent antidote kit. The antidote kit consisted of the two active ingredients, atropine and chlorine.

A destruction facility, such as the one at Edgewood is allowed to have a certain amount of chemical agent on hand for testing, Army chemist George Smith said. This facility looks like a long corridor with glass windows throughout and is actually the only small-scale facility in the United States. The testing began there more than 10 years ago, with storage being its primary purpose originally. Now the mustard neutralization area makes some of its own chemical agents, but those at the facility chose to experiment on the HD agent that has been stored at Aberdeen. According to Smith, 100 pounds has been created there.

An experiment was performed for the group from Madison County. A two-liter bottle sat under a vent hood which draws the fumes through it as experiments are done. Smith transferred 15 milliliters of HD into a separate foil-covered container. Then the agent is placed into 500 ml of boiling water with a small stirrer rod that spins magnetically.

Aberdeen Test Center

Then the tour made its way to the Aberdeen Test Center on the base. There they learned more about electro-chemical oxidation by seeing it in action on a number of different chemicals.

The electro-chemical oxidation, or Silver II, process uses a modified disassembly process. In it munitions are punched and the liquid agent is drained. The cavity is steam cleaned. Then, for rockets the rest of the munition is cut using a high-pressure jet of water and grit.

The agent and slurried energetics are held and fed into separate electro-chemical oxidation units. These units add silver and nitrogen compounds and feed the result into an electrical cell. The electricity creates silver ions which oxidizes the material. The silver and nitrogen are reused in the process after it is recovered.

The facility at Aberdeen that experiments on this technology was initially built as a blast containment area, with giant holes in the hinged walls. Two apparatus demonstrate the process. The first one is about two feet tall. The other stands in the center of the cylinder room at about two stories tall. This structure functions on 12 kilowatts. The model that would be used in the actual destruction agent would operate at a megawatt and be 10 times as tall.

The scientists that work on the operation have modified the rig somewhat from its initial specifications, but it still functions with the same procedure.

That procedure is very similar to the functions of a car battery, with anolyte and catolyte being separated by a membrane similar visually to a car radiator. While this scaled down version has only one membrane, if implemented, the program would have several more cells.

This technique is also stirred with a device that resembled a boat rudder, to agitate the solution of silver, nitric acid and chemical agent. It, in turn, makes a two-foot cyclone. After that, the product enters a stage condenser. It dries the moisture out of it and releases
any organic or volatiles left.

"Incineration is oxidation using high temperature," Army chemist Chris Jones said. "This process is oxidation using a chemical reaction."

Heightened awareness

Since Congress developed ACWA in 1997, there have been a number of events that have come into play. One of the more important events was the attacks on Sept. 11. This hit home for the site at Aberdeen, with its close proximity to Washington D.C.

Since that time the ACANF enhanced security quite a bit. It has also initiated the construction of earth-covered protective structures. The BGAD stores all of its chemicals in underground containment facilities, whereas the Maryland site has all of its chemicals stored outside.

"The sooner we can finish disposal, the sooner we can put more funds going toward the war effort," acting deputy site manager Brian O'Donnell said.

The PMCD plans to develop a means for safely accelerating the destruction of agent at Maryland's site by applying neutralization technology and use existing structures and equipment that is already there. This ranges from draining containers manually using glove boxes instead of robotics technology all the way to integrating the use of a offsite hydrolysate biotreatment plant into the process. This would, in theory trim more than two years off the projected time of disposal.

What it does to the ACANF is leave some business unfinished, especially pertaining to the construction of its on-site biotreatment plant. Inside a roofless concrete skeleton of a building sits four titanium bioreactors costing a quarter of a million dollars each. There are three of them on the premises, although the others do not contain the titanium tanks. They have never been used and unless things change drastically, they never will.

"We were at that part of the process where we were about to put on the suring and the rebarb on the roof to get ready to pour the concrete," O'Donnell said. "Even though our workers continued working, we would not be able to got the reactors out. So our program manager had to put out a limited work order telling them not to do that while we were still investigating the possibility of considering alternatives. That came into fruition so this has all been terminated."