With the news of another delay in a long line of setbacks at the Tooele County chemical weapons incinerator, environmentalists said they are disappointed and concerned but not surprised.
When the depot announced in August it had begun destroying the last of its chemical weapons stockpile - thousands of tons of mustard agent - it also quietly conceded the timeline for destruction had been pushed back to 2016, six years later than its previous estimate.
It wasn't the first setback for the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency: The nation's entire usable stockpile of chemical weapons was originally intended to be destroyed by 1994. But the new 2016 timetable has put the Army on the wrong side of an international treaty, a federal base-closing plan and a host of community activists who have argued, for more than a decade, that the incinerators being used at Deseret weren't up to the task of safely destroying some of the world's most dangerous weapons.
So while acknowledging 2016 is the official target date, Army officials said they had learned from past delays and are actually hoping to be finished by 2012.
Documents filed last month with the state Department of Environmental Quality, however, indicate Deseret once again is having trouble keeping on schedule. In the documents, Army officials asked the state to push back a deadline for a monitored "trial burn," in which incinerator operators must prove they can keep the furnace running clean and safe for a prolonged period of time.
That test was scheduled to occur last fall. Deseret officials now say they are hoping to get it done this winter. Martin Gray, who monitors chemical demilitarization for Utah's Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste, said the state was "more than happy to grant that request."
But not everyone felt the same way. Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said giving the plant more time to prepare for its test was akin to giving a car owner more time to adjust the vehicle's carburetor, raise the idle speed and change out the spark plugs and oil in order to "fix" a vehicle before emissions inspection.
"It allows them to tweak the system until they can get the results they need to achieve a clean trial burn," said Pierce, who said the "toxic crap" released in the air during the so-called "shakedown period" wasn't being monitored by Deseret or the state of Utah.
Gray disagreed. He said the depot is, in fact, monitoring its stack for emissions of mustard and mercury.
Under the terms of the shakedown period, the depot may not be operating most efficiently, but it will be operating safely, Gray said.
"They're operating in a manner protective of human health and the environment," he said.
But Gray conceded Deseret is not monitoring for other potentially harmful emissions, including dioxin, which the National Research Council has concluded is a potent cancer-causing chemical.
"We don't know exactly" what is being emitted during the shakedown burn, he said, "but we have good idea because we have data from other incinerators" similar to the one in Tooele.
And that data suggests the levels of emitted dioxin and other toxins are safe, he said.
"Impossible," argued Craig Williams, director of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group and a 2006 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, one of world's most prestigious awards for environmentalists.
Williams said the Army has never fed an incinerator with the same combination of mustard agent, toxic sludge, mercury and metal that is going into the Deseret furnace.
Deseret's request for a shakedown-period extension said incinerator operators had encountered unexpected problems due to finding concentrations of mustard and mercury that hadn't been seen before.
"And if you're not feeding in exactly identical materials, you can't have a complete and thorough analysis," Williams said. "It's just a real guessing game as to what is coming out."
More than 185 tons of mustard agent have been destroyed during the shakedown period, according to a report released Wednesday by Deseret. Army Chemical Materials Agency spokesman Greg Mahall said the military remains confident it has all been destroyed in a manner that is "perfectly safe."
And Deseret spokeswoman Alaine Southworth said that the recent request for more time shouldn't be seen as an indication that the base won't meet its 2012 goal, but rather as an indication that the base is committed to making the mustard burn "even safer."
"What it does is it gets us more on target so we can be more efficient," she said. "We're still looking at meeting all our objectives."
Eliminating Deseret's stockpile by 2012 would allow base officials to say they had done their part under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires the destruction of all usable chemical weapons by that year. The U.S. State Department said in April that it didn't expect the deadline to be met and named Deseret as one of six facilities that likely would be operating past that time.
In planning budget-saving base closures last year, the Defense Department had figured Deseret would be closed by 2008. The additional years of operation will result in a loss of savings of at least $120 million, according to the Pentagon's figures.
That's pretty much par for the course, said Steve Erickson, director of the Salt Lake City-based Citizens Education Project, which monitors Deseret.
"This is absolutely typical of that program," Erickson said. "They're years past deadline and billions over budget."
mlaplante@sltrib.com
- Sulfur mustard, a chemical warfare agent, causes blistering of the skin and mucous membranes on contact.
- It is known as "mustard gas'' or ''mustard agent," or by the military designations H, HD and HT.
- It sometimes smells like garlic, onions, or mustard, and sometimes has no odor. It can be a vapor, an oily-textured liquid or a solid.
- It can be clear to yellow or brown when it is in liquid or solid form.
- Sulfur mustard damages the skin, eyes and respiratory tract.
- It also damages DNA, a vital component of cells in the body.