Local
Published: April 10, 2009
Army may reconsider shipping depot waste
By JOHN NORTON
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
A group of civic leaders from around the state were told during a recent trip to Washington, D.C., that the Department of Defense will not try to ship the waste from neutralized mustard agent at the Pueblo Chemical Depot to another location for treatment.
State and local officials have been urging the Defense Department for two years to keep the mustard agent hydrolysate, a hazardous material, here and break it down through biotreatment.
Members of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarizations Citizens Advisory Commission have expressed worry that an accident in shipment or just refusal by other states or communities to allow it to pass through could cause more delays in the program. Pentagon officials have maintained it’s cheaper to contract for treatment at another site but the commission members warn that savings could easily vanish if costly delays occurred.
For U.S. Rep. Ray Kogovsek, who now lobbies for local agencies, was at the meeting and said, “We got the definite impression that they want to do it here in Pueblo, to get rid of everything here in Pueblo. (But) they still will not take the (off-site) option off of the table.
“We had a lengthy discussion with them,” he said, referring to the officials that included Frederick Celec, assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs and Kevin Flamm, manager of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program. “It’s almost impossible to get another state to accept it,” Kogovsek said.
The Defense Department did prevail in court against environmentalists trying to block the shipment of nerve agent hydrolysate from Newport, Ind., to an incinerator in Port Arthur, Texas, last year but Kogovsek said, “They would rather not go through that again.”
Gail Klapper, director of the Forum, said that the officials indicated their intent to do the work locally but also called the biotreatment plan unproven technology and warned that there would be no money left to pay for off-site treatment if the local operation failed.
The local option would call for a small plant similar to a municipal sewer treatment facility where bacteria would break down the hazardous chemicals and then the solids would be transported to a dump able to accept them.
Biotreatment has been used by DuPont to break down the mustard agent hydrolysate from bulk mustard agent neutralized at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
Irene Kornelly, chairwoman of the citizens committee, said, “There has always been the acknowledgement that if it doesn’t work, whatever ‘it’ is, we’re going to have to come up with Plan B but that has to be proven after they’ve tried to get it to work.”
norton@chieftain.com