Thursday, August 26, 1999
Weapons unlikely to be burned
Alternatives looking better, official says
The Associated Press
LEXINGTON, Ky. — The chairman of a federal panel investigating alternatives to incinerating chemical weapons said those housed at the Blue Grass Army Depot probably will not be burned.
The arsenal of old weapons at the facility near Richmond, about 25 miles south of Lexington, probably will be destroyed by one of the alternate methods now being analyzed, Robert Beaudet, a physical chemist at the University of Southern California, said Tuesday.
The Army determined in the early 1980s that incineration was the safest way to destroy the 30,000 tons of old chemical weapons across the country, including the 523 tons of mustard gas and nerve-gas rockets stored in central Kentucky.
Opponents, however, claim burning the weapons poses environmental and public-safety risks. In 1996, Congress ordered that the Army investigate alternatives, particularly for use at the Blue Grass Army Depot and at a similar site in Pueblo, Colo.
Mr. Beaudet headed a National Research Council (NRC) panel that investigated seven methods besides incineration for destroying old chemical weapons. In its report, the group determined that all of the alternate methods would work but that further testing is needed to know what risks each method poses.
“Each technology package raises other technical issues that must be resolved,” the report said. “One of the crucial issues is the identity and disposition of byproducts.”
The government faces an April 2007 deadline to destroy all of its old chemical weapons. In its report, the NRC panel concluded that it is unlikely that any of the alternate methods studied could be ready to meet that deadline.
Meanwhile, $93 million in congressional budget cuts approved last week could delay weapons destruction at some military installations. Nearly one-fourth of the cuts will come at the Blue Grass Army Depot, where at least 1.7 percent of the military's lethal chemical agents are stored. But Mickey Morales, a spokesman for the Army's Office of the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization, said that decision will have little effect on the plan to dispose of chemical weapons there.
Delays in determining how the Army will destroy its stockpile in Kentucky mean the government will not be ready in fiscal year 2000 — which begins Oct. 1 — to build the facility where the weapons will be dismantled, Mr. Morales said.
Robert Steurer, a spokesman for Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been active in the battle over how the chemicals will be destroyed, said Tuesday that Mr. McConnell is watching the situation closely and wants to make sure that budget cuts don't endanger the congressional directive to test the alternate technologies.
The alternate methods include vaporizing the rockets with a form of artificial lightning; using liquid nitrogen to freeze the weapons; and combining other chemicals to make the nerve agent into a less-toxic substance that can be digested by microorganisms.
The NRC report did not rank the methods, and it did not compare any of them with incineration. The results of the testing on three of the proposed alternatives are due to be submitted to Congress before the end of September. The Army also plans to conduct detailed testing of three other methods.
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