| Article Last Updated: 01/22/2005 |
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For decades, Utah has shouldered
the environmental risks of storing, then destroying, many of the nation's
chemical weapons. Now, because the Pentagon wants to save money, there is
a chance that more weapons could be shipped here for incineration. But Utah
has done more than its share already, and it would be wrong for this state
to take on that additional risk, especially since Congress promised in 1994
that that would not happen. In 1987, the Army decided - rightly, in our view - to destroy its chemical weapons on site at the eight depots in the continental United States where they are stored. In 1994, Congress cemented that decision by passing a law that the noxious stuff could not be transported across state lines. The largest share of that national arsenal, about 44 percent, was stored at Deseret Chemical Depot near Tooele. The Army built a $400 million high-tech incinerator there to destroy those weapons, which began operation in 1996. To date, 53 percent of the chemical agents and 87 percent of the munitions at Deseret have been burned. Environmentalists have argued from the beginning that incineration was a flawed disposal technology, because, they said, malfunctions could allow unburned agents to escape up the stack, and some highly toxic dioxins would escape the process even under the best of circumstances. They argued that chemical neutralization was safer. After a report by the National Research Council in 2002 confirmed that neutralization was a mature, safe technology, the Army decided to use it at four of the other depots. But in Utah, and at three other sites, the Army stuck with its incinerators. One depot, at Pueblo, Colo., houses a stockpile of mustard agent. Today, design work on a chemical neutralization plant for that site is on hold while the Army studies whether, to save money, it should relocate those weapons. Tooele would be an obvious place to send Pueblo's nasty inventory. The Tooele incinerator already has completed destruction of the most hazardous nerve agent, GB, and it is scheduled to complete the burning of all of the second nerve agent, VX, in the spring of this year. After that, the incinerator will be adjusted to destroy Deseret's mustard agent, the same stuff stored at Pueblo. But packing up the mustard and shipping it to Tooele presents hazards of its own. That's a major reason why the Army decided back in the '80s not to move the stuff. Utahns are fully aware of the pressure on the defense budget and the national debt created by the war in Iraq. But sending more chemical weapons to Utah for destruction by an inferior technology is too high a price to pay for budget relief. The state government and Utah's congressional delegation should burn this bridge now. |