It's always shameful when one sees the Associated Press reporters distorting the Army's record and efforts to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with environmental laws and international agreements. But it's more shocking when supposedly unbiased science journals such as Scientific American pick up the story and regurgitate it without any objective analysis. The latest "scandal" revolves around the Army's Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) project's proposal to "blow up" chemical munitions at Pueblo Chemical Depot in order to both address the issue of leaking mustard rounds and to start reducing the stockpile prior to the start of operations of the neutralization facility (expected somewhere around 2016).
Although the U.S. military has been working with Defense Department contractors for more than a decade to develop technology that could neutralize its chemical arsenal without the need for detonation, the Associated Press recently reports that the Army is now proposing the use of explosives to destroy some of the 125,000 weapons being stored at chemical depots in Colorado and Kentucky. This might speed the process some, but the Army acknowledges that it will still miss the 2012 deadline set by Congress in 1997.
Not surprisingly, residents in and around the Army's Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Ky., are nonplussed with the military's proposed approach, saying that blowing up these weapons would be even worse than a previous plan to burn them at high temperatures, according to the AP. The residents want the military to revert to its original proposal of mixing the toxic chemicals with water, bacteria or other substances that neutralize the poison and then carting them off to a hazardous waste dump.
The Army's plan to reduce its chemical weapons arsenal by blowing up part of it is less a matter of an expedience than an admission that the military hasn't found a better way of dealing with the problem. "I wouldn't say [detonation] provides much acceleration," Kevin Flamm, the Army's program manager for neutralization operations at Pueblo and blue Grass, said during briefings in December, according to the AP. Although the Army wanted to find an alternative to blowing up its chemical weapons, Flamm says, "Frankly there isn't any other technologies we've found that can eliminate these weapons safely and environmentally friendly in the time frame we're looking at."
Oh where to begin. Well, we could start by saying that the U.S. military HAS a safe and efficient way to eliminate its chemical weapons without detonation, it's called incineration, and it's been very effective at five other chemical stockpile sites. Yes, of course the Army is going to miss the 2012 deadline (which oh by the way, Sen. Mitch "I luv Blue Grass" McConnell had extended to 2017), but that's due to Congressional direction (fueled by environmental activists) that forced an immature and unprecedented neutralization technology (in terms of being used on an industrial scale as opposed to lab bench) onto the Army. But the media's ignorance of the chem demil history is old news.
When the ACWA project office proposed detonating some of the mustard-filled munitions, it was not proposing open-air explosions or open-pit burning as the AP article suggests, nor was it suggesting replacing the neutralization plant being built at Pueblo. It was talking about using a proven, mature process called Explosive Destruction Technologies (EDT) to make the time between today and when the facility opens more productive. This process involves placing a munition inside of a detonation chamber with explosives, cracking the munition and draining the agent, and capturing any gases that are released as a result of the operation. The Army has successfully used this process to deal with "non-stockpile chemical munitions," i.e., those abandoned chemical muntions that turn up from time to time at formerly used defense sites. It's particularly safe when used on munitions that aren't fuzed (like those at Pueblo).
The typical approach to dealing with leakers at the chemical storage sites is to just overpack the munitions in a larger container. But since state and local officials at Pueblo have obstructed the Army's attempts to quickly destroy the munitions at their site by insisting on a neutralization technology that is going to create millions of gallons of waste water that has to be treated prior to releasing it into the environment, the disposal process has been delayed and the number of leakers continues to grow. Using the EDT at Pueblo would at least reduce the danger of leakers and begin reducing the stockpile while the construction of the neutralization facility continued.
Now the EDT process is not quick. It's not going to result in the Army's meeting the 2012 deadline. It's not the technology you would want to use to do the entire stockpile, because it's single munitions at a time, and from that viewpoint, while it's a safe process, it's not efficient. But it would begin the process of increasing the safety of the workers and the community by decreasing the number of chemical munitions. So why are the Luddites in Pueblo's community up in arms, consciously ignoring what the Army is telling them? Easy. It's because of the money. For every munition that is destroyed through EDT, that's less money that will go to the Pueblo community because it's speeding up the time when the Pueblo Chemical Depot will be closed. When the depot closes, then the local jobs go away and the federal emergency response funds dry up. And make no mistake, the idea of Pueblo closing scares the shit out of them.
The AP article is full of distorted and sensationalistic statements. The mustard munitions don't hold "the nastiest compounds every made," the EDT process doesn't "put the safety of the citizens below the politics of diplomacy," the Army is not asking to "use explosives to destroy all 125,000" munitions, and it's very hard to see how blowing up munitions inside of a detonation chamber "would be worse than burning them." This news coverage is pretty shameful stuff, and despite the Army's very transparent process and constant attempts to engage the public on this issue, the message is constantly distorted by the media and unscrupulous activists.
In other news, the Army's Chemical Materials Agency, which is now focused on chemical weapons storage and operating the incineration plants, is doing very well, thank you. But that's not "news."
Scientific American is not a serious scientific journal. It is a tabloid. Just like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
You want an unbiased science journal?
Read a peer reviewed journal. Before any article is published it is picked appart by experts in the field.
Posted by: Scathsealgaire | 25 February 2010 at 06:49 PM
We were looking at detonation chambers more than a decade ago, because the Brits use them all the time quite successfully, and the Germans have a production-scale explosion process that they've been using successfully for just about as long. You're right: This is all about more money for the poor community of Pueblo than it is about the "right thing" to do.
Posted by: Ann Gaothin | 26 February 2010 at 09:36 AM