As the U.S. Army cranks up its Deseret Chemical Depot incinerator located just south of Tooele to destroy 6,000 tons of mustard gas, critics are mounting one last, big push to shut down the process before the exhaust seeps any further into Utah communities.
That push took the form of an engineering report, published by the Chemical Weapons Working Group and recently delivered to Utah's two U.S. senators, as well as senators from three other impacted states, calling on the Army to study the possibility of destroying the deadly chemicals instead by use of nonburning technologies.
Such alternate methods for destroying mustard gas might be cheaper and faster than burning, not to mention better at safeguarding public health, the report said: "Until and unless these issues are thoroughly addressed, the Army is not fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens under U.S. law."
The group has long campaigned against the current system of weapons incineration, saying that if the mustard gas can be destroyed without burning, it should be. Moreover, they note that the Army has used alternative methods elsewhere to neutralize mustard gas. The push for alternative methods of burning the mustard gas is especially crucial now, the group says, because among all the deadly chemical agents the incinerator has burned so far since it began destroying Utah's share of the nation’Äô's vast store of stockpiled chemical weapons in 1996, mustard gas is the most difficult to burn safely. Not only does it produce toxins known to be harmful to humans, it also was recently found to contain mercury, which isn’Äôt destroyed in the incineration process.
"Tooele is flying by the seat of their pants on this thing. They don't have a grip on how to handle the known complications, let alone when they run into things that aren’Äôt anticipated," said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group. "We believe that will result in a significant number of technological problems, schedule extensions and cost overruns."
Williams is not your usual armchair alarmist or critic. He won the Goldman Environmental Prize this year for work that led the Army to develop alternatives to incineration during the late-1990s. Unfortunately, by the time new technologies were developed, Utah’Äôs incinerator had already been built.
The volume of mustard gas scheduled for incineration at the Deseret Chemical Depot is massive, equal to almost the entire 7,409 tons of other chemical weapons destroyed at the incinerator so far since 1996. The exhaust of mustard-gas incineration may hang over our heads until the year 2012, if all goes as planned, or until 2016, if glitches in the Army's incineration program arise. Destruction of nerve agents was completed last year, but the yet-to-be destroyed mustard gas stockpile remains the largest chemical warfare stockpile in the country.
In addition to concerns over mercury, there's the unknown factor of what decades of storage has produced inside the mustard gas containers, some of which date to the end of WWII.
"If you don't know what is going in, you can't ensure what comes out is safe," said Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, a successor organization to Families Against Incinerator Risk, a group of western Utah residents banded together to monitor the burning of chemical weapons.
Still, Pierce's biggest concern remains mercury, which the Army discovered in some of the mustard batches during testing in preparation for the burn. Pierce said the Army also recently indicated in disclosure documents that it wanted to incinerate trichloroethylene, the metal cleaner made famous in a successful class-action lawsuit that Erin Brockovich worked on, and the basis of a popular film a few years back.
Pierce believes the U.S. Army could learn a lot from a chemical weapons plant in Aberdeen, Md., which destroyed its entire stockpile of 1,800 tons of mustard gas using a process mixing the deadly agent with boiling water to separate elements that are later neutralized with bacteria.
The so-called "boiling water" process is proven, Pierce said, while the shakier incineration method, which has been scrutinized under less testing, is sure to run into problems. "It looks like once they built the incinerator, the Army was not willing to consider alternatives here," Pierce lamented.
Williams said switching to a nonburning technology similar to the Maryland plant's at the Tooele facility likely would require construction of a new facility. But Williams believes the public's safety is worth the study of a possible alternative.
To all this concern, the U.S. Army says not to worry. In a press release announcing the start of its mustard-gas burn-off, the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility said all mustard containers would be sampled for mercury levels before burning. So far, the plan is to begin burning batches with the lowest mercury levels, as the next 18 months are spent developing and designing a mercury filter for incinerator exhaust.
Although accidents, warnings and alarms at the Deseret Chemical Depot have been documented over the years, a lot of concern has dissipated.
"When we first started the incinerator, there were a lot of us who didn't want it in our back yards," said Beverly White, a Tooele resident, former Utah lawmaker and one-time incinerator opponent who now serves on a citizens' commission that advises Utah's governor on chemical-weapons demilitarization. "As I’Äôve watched it progress over the years, I think they've been about as good as anyplace. I don’Äôt think the public has any great worries."
Pierce, meanwhile, asks if the risk is worth it. "When it comes to the health and safety of families, we need a precautionary approach," she said.