INDIANAPOLIS -
Army officials acknowledged in court Monday that they could not say with certainty that waste from neutralized VX nerve agent does not contain trace amounts of the deadly chemical.
"I don't know of an analytical instrument today that can give you an absolute. I can't say it's zero," Col. Jesse Barber, a project manager for the Army Chemical Materials Agency, testified during a hearing to determine whether shipments of the waste could resume from the Newport Chemical Depot in western Indiana to an incinerator in Texas.
U.S. District Judge Larry McKinney is holding a hearing on whether he should grant a request by environmental groups to block shipments of the liquid VX waste hydrolysate to Port Arthur, Texas. The Army already has been stunted in two previous bids to ship the waste from Newport.
Mick Harrison, an attorney for the environmental groups, questioned Barber and Jeff Brubaker, the Army's on-site manager at Newport, about samples taken from spills of hydrolysate at Newport that initially showed levels of VX and a toxic byproduct of the neutralization process known as Experimental Agent 2192 that exceeded the Army's maximum allowable levels for shipments.
Barber and Brubaker both said that additional testing showed the levels were within limits set by the Army. They also discounted theories that VX could reform in tanks of the neutralized waste.
Brubaker also deemed it unlikely that terrorists or others could manufacture VX from precursor chemicals known to remain in the waste.
"I can't say that it could not be done, but it would be very difficult to do that," he said under questioning from Harrison.
Attorneys for the Army argued during the hearing, which is to resume on Tuesday, that it had done what the law required and that arguments that VX might reform or be hijacked by terrorists were highly speculative.
Project foe Craig Williams of the Berea, Ky.-based Chemical Weapons Working Group said before the hearing that the high levels found in samples called into question the Army's argument that it knows the hydrolysate is safe enough to be shipped by truck from Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute.
The 900-mile route to Port Arthur passes through the metropolitan areas of Memphis, Tenn.; Jackson, Miss.; and Baton Rouge and Lafayette, La., Williams said.
"They have found VX and EA2192 in higher concentrations than it showed when they first got the material out of the reactor, which means that some time between the reaction and their sampling of these tankers, VX and EA2192 are either reforming or concentrating in a higher concentration or something, but it is there," Williams told reporters outside the courthouse.
The Army remains confident the hydrolysate is safe enough to be shipped to Port Arthur, and it won approvals from regulators in each of the states the shipments will pass through, Army spokesman Greg Mahall said.
"To date, we've sent 103 truckloads before we voluntarily stopped shipping without a single incident, accident, whatever," Mahall said.
Although those shipments are on hold, an Army contractor continues to chemically neutralize Newport's VX stockpile, which was originally more than 250,000 gallons. As of last Tuesday, that project had destroyed 59 percent, or about 177,000 gallons, of VX.
In April, the Army signed a $49 million contract with Veolia Environmental Services to incinerate about 2 million gallons of the hydrolysate in Port Arthur, located near the Louisiana border. That agreement came after two earlier deals, with Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc. (nasdaq: PESI - news - people ), in Dayton, Ohio, and DuPont (nyse: DD - news - people ) Co. in Deepwater, N.J., were scuttled because of strong opposition.
Opponents want the Army to stick to its original plan of disposing of the VX waste at the Indiana depot.