Army Halts VX Destruction

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

The Army's controversial and problem-plagued plan to destroy VX nerve agent stored at Newport, Ind., just hit another snag: The waste by-product of VX neutralization is flammable.

Under current plans, the Army would neutralize VX at Newport and transport the by-product, called hydrolysate, to a DuPont facility in New Jersey for secondary treatment and ultimate disposal in the Delaware River. But continued VX destruction along with the transport plans came to a halt when the Army discovered during lab testing that the hydrolysate has a flash point of 68-88 F instead of an expected flash point of greater than 200 F.

Previous bench-scale tests conducted at the Army's Edgewood, Md., labs found that the hydrolysate formed from neutralization of VX samples taken from Newport's stockpile had the higher flash point, explains Army spokeswoman Terry Arthur. She says a team of engineers is now working to explain the difference.

One possible explanation for the lower flash point is the formation of diisopropylamine during neutralization of the larger quantities of VX at Newport, a formation that did not occur in the earlier Edgewood lab tests.

Any material below the 200-degree threshold is considered flammable, and DuPont's Secure Environmental Treatment at Deepwater, N.J., does not handle flammable waste. The flammability of the hydrolysate "is new information and different from that in the Army's original proposal to us," says DuPont spokesman Anthony Farina. "The Army has pledged to address the problem and believes that it can be addressed. We'll wait to see where it ends up," he adds.

The Army had planned a pause in its destruction schedule to assess the neutralization process, but before the pause could occur, a 30-gal spill of VX had already forced operations to shut down (C&EN, June 20, page 22). Neutralization had not yet resumed when on-site lab tests conducted "as part of a waste profile needed for commercial posttreatment" revealed the flammability problem, Arthur says.

To date, the Army has neutralized more than 3,000 gal of the more than 250,000 gal of VX stored at Newport over the past 35 years.

The spill and the flammability problem prompted Rep. Rob E. Andrews (D-N.J.) and Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) to express their concerns to Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey. In a June 30 letter, they write that, given the inherent risks in VX destruction, "the Army should minimize these risks by treating all of the VX hydrolysate on-site at Newport."

Andrews cites the fact that the "VX hydrolysate is three times more flammable than we were originally told [as] further evidence to support on-site treatment of this unpredictable hazardous waste." And Corzine, who is the Democratic nominee for governor, has said that if elected, he would block any environmental permits needed by DuPont to treat the hydrolysate.