Dressed & ready: Weapons incineration to take up to 6 years, cost $2.4 billion

This story was published Mon, Aug 9, 2004

Jeannine Koranda
Herald staff writer

HERMISTON - After years of planning and delays, the Umatilla Chemical Depot looks ready to begin incinerating its aging stockpile of chemical weapons as soon as Aug. 18.

The ticklish process of destroying the deadly nerve and blister agents stored at the depot relies on a massive $395 million incinerator that took four years to build, followed by more than two years of testing.

When incineration begins, Umatilla is expected to be the fifth of nine U.S. chemical weapons storage sites to begin destroying munitions and the fourth to do so using incineration.

About 800 workers are expected to operate the Umatilla plant for the next six years in a $2.4 billion program to destroy the site's weapons.

At Umatilla, 90 storage "igloo" bunkers hold 7.4 million pounds of deadly nerve and mustard agents. The site also has the largest number of M55 chemical rockets - some 91,000 packed with the nerve agent GB and more than 14,000 filled with the nerve agent VX.

The Army also has stashed land mines, spray tanks, bombs and steel containers filled with GB and VX and mustard blister agent at the Oregon depot, which straddles Morrow and Umatilla counties.

The Umatilla weapons cache - stockpiled between 1962 and 1969 - is 12 percent of the U.S. stockpile.

Johnston Atoll near Hawaii was the first to destroy its weapons, finishing in November 2000. Tooele, Utah, has destroyed almost 6.7 tons of agents, or almost half, of its stockpile, and expects to be done in 2008.

Other chemical stockpiles include Aberdeen, Md., which has started destroying its stockpile using a neutralization technique, and the Anniston, Ala., facility which is almost finished incinerating its stockpile of GB rockets.

Other sites are at Pine Bluff, Ark.; Pueblo, Colo.; Newport, Ind. and Blue Grass, Ky. All of those, except for Pine Bluff, plan to use neutralization.

"A lot of our procedures were started at Tooele and then updated from Anniston," said Doug Hamrick, project general manager for Washington Group International, the company hired to run the Umatilla incinerator.

The first few days of the startup process will mirror the process at Anniston a year ago, said Hamrick, who worked at the Alabama facility.

"We're exactly modeling our startup on their process," he said. "There is no race here. If we see anything abnormal, we'll stop and fix it before we go on."

The goal is not just to start operations but to sustain them, he said.

On Anniston's first day of operation on Aug. 9, 2003, workers pushed two GB rockets into the facility, said Mike Abrams, an Army spokesman for the Anniston Chemical Depot.

On the first day, one rocket was drained, cut into eight sections and incinerated on one processing line, he said. On the second day, a second rocket was destroyed on the second line.

"The next day we did a couple more," Abrams said. "We started off taking baby steps until all four of our crews had experience processing some rockets."

Then the plant slowly ratcheted up the rate, he said. As of Aug. 3, Anniston had destroyed 34,361 of its GB M55 rockets.

The plant is now starting to process rockets that had started leaking fluids so they were "overpacked" into larger steel containers and stored in a separate igloo for "leakers."

"We can see soon that all of the GB rockets are going to be gone. We can see soon the processing of artillery shells," Abrams said. "We can see the light at the end of the GB tunnel."

The incinerator at Anniston is a good model for the Umatilla Chemical Depot.

"If you were in the bowels of the facilities, you might be hard put, even if you were very familiar with either facility, (to say) that this is Anniston or this is Umatilla," Hamrick said.

The only major difference is Umatilla has two liquid incinerators to burn the chemical agents, Hamrick said. Anniston has only one.

That's because the Umatilla Chemical Depot stores more bulk containers like ton containers that hold liquid mustard.

All of the incineration facilities share information, Hamrick said. "In addition to a database of lessons learned, we also communicate extensively with those other sites."

At the end of July, workers from the Umatilla Chemical Depot visited the plants at Pine Bluff, Ark., and Anniston, Hamrick said.

The same day as Umatilla workers were visiting the Alabama and Arkansas sites, Chris West, the protocol manager at Pine Bluff, was visiting the Umatilla facility.

Pine Bluff expects to start incinerating its stockpile no later than February, West said. He said it was helpful to see what was going on at Umatilla and he was "picking up bits and pieces and how we can do it better at Pine Bluff."

Like in Anniston, Umatilla will start by destroying rockets containing GB, said Mary Binder, Army spokeswoman at Umatilla.

It should take about two years to destroy Umatilla's stockpile of rockets, she said. Previous estimates put the Umatilla stockpile at more than 100,000 rockets.

The Umatilla incinerator can destroy 40 rockets in an hour, but "the effective rate is probably about half that, or 20 an hour," Hamrick said. That includes time for repairs and other delays.

The rockets will be transported from the storage igloos to the incinerator in giant cylindrical shipping containers, Binder said. The containers can hold up to two pallets holding 15 rockets each.

Tooele and Anniston both used the shipping containers, although at Johnston Atoll the weapons were simply placed on a flatbed truck and driven to the incinerator, Binder said.

The trucks will be driven slowly to the container handling building next to the incinerator and unloaded. At that point, Washington Group International will take control, Hamrick said.

The handling area can hold up to 48 shipping containers, although typically there would not be that many, Hamrick said.

Munitions will be moved from the storage igloos only during daylight hours and safe weather conditions, such as when the wind isn't blowing toward populated areas, Hamrick said. Weapons destruction can occur even when munitions are not being moved because of the storage area.

An elevator will take the sealed containers to the second-floor unpacking area. After workers have determined that none of the rockets has leaked, the containers will be opened and the pallets moved by forklifts to one of two processing lines.

At the lines, two workers will lift one rocket, which weighs 60 to 70 pounds, onto a metering machine, Hamrick said.

Binder said that point will be "the last direct hands-on human interaction" with the rockets. The rest of the process is done robotically.

The metering machine will check to make sure each rocket is pointed in the right direction before moving it into the explosive containment room.

The Umatilla Chemical Depot stores a variety of munitions, and each has a slightly different destruction process, Binder said. Anything with explosives, like rockets, goes into one of two explosive containment rooms.

Munitions without explosives will go on a bypass line to a processing bay, where they will be drained of chemical agent. Walls of the processing rooms are made of concrete 28 inches thick, Binder said.

In the containment room, the rockets will be clamped into position and holes punched into them, Hamrick said. "The agent is drained into a collecting system using a vacuum," he said.

Each rocket holds a little more than a gallon of chemical agent, and the amount drained out will be measured as part of the record provided to demilitarization treaty personnel, Hamrick said.

The weapons are being destroyed under the April 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. As of March 2003, the treaty had been signed by more than 175 countries, and the United States and Russia are to have their stockpiles eliminated by April 2007.

After being drained from the weapons, the chemical agent will go into a 1,200-gallon collection tank to be incinerated in the liquid incinerators, Hamrick said. "We'll probably collect a week or so of rockets before actually initiating the flow to the (liquid) incinerator," he said.

Once the rockets are drained, they will be moved to the rocket shearing machine and be cut into eight pieces, he said. The pieces will drop into the deactivation kiln, which will destroy the agent before the pieces drop into a bin outside the building, Binder said.

The other byproduct of the process, salt from the pollution abatement system, will be sent to a hazardous waste landfill in Arlington, Ore., she said.

Originally, the incinerator facility was designed with two liquid incinerators, a deactivation furnace, a metal parts furnace and a dunnage furnace to burn waste related to the facility, such as pallets or protective clothing.

The dunnage furnace was eliminated and the waste will be burned in one of the other incinerators, Binder said.

 

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