In earthen bunkers at the Anniston Army Depot, more than 42,700 M55 rockets filled with sarin nerve agent await the end of their troubled lives. These rockets are the problem children of a nasty brood of weapons designed in the middle part of last century to deter the Soviet chemical threat. As history would have it, the rockets never found their way to war. Instead they've moldered in their homes, worsened with age, and caused their keepers, the U.S. Army, more headaches than they ever caused the USSR.
Relatively unstable and leaky, the rockets long have posed a threat to the community outside the depot. In recent years, Army officials have found that the rockets' decrepit condition has caused complications for their disposal.
Local Army officials estimate that a significant amount of sarin nerve agent in about 30 percent of the rockets has changed from a liquid into something else. This transformed agent is alternately described as crystallized, solidified, thickened and, most commonly, gelled.
The change has made the Army depart in a key way from the process honed at early chemical weapons incinerators in the Pacific Ocean and in Utah. At base, this process involves first siphoning the agent from the rocket, and then burning the agent in one furnace and the munition parts in another. But because the gelled agent can't be entirely drained, the Army has had to find another way - namely, to burn the entire rocket in one furnace.
At an incinerator in Tooele, Utah, the Army has done this at the gingerly rate of fewer than two rockets per hour. In Anniston, managers of the incinerator want to use the same procedure, but they'll try to do it at the rate of 34 an hour.
This program change has raised more than a few eyebrows, and not just because of the higher proposed rate of operations. The procedure as developed in Tooele and planned for Anniston apparently contradicts safety recommendations made by an independent panel of scientists in a 1994 report - a fact that has become fodder for those who oppose the incinerator program.
"It's extremely dangerous," said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group. "It's never been tried before. It's completely experimental. And it flies in the face of normal industrial practices."
Army officials stand by the plans, insisting that during trial burns scheduled for December they will prove the facility's safety and efficiency.
"It has been tried and proven," said Tim Garrett, the Army project manager at the incinerator. "(The Tooele facility) burned one rocket an hour and that's where we're going to start from. We will gradually ramp up, if we ramp up at all, from one rocket at a time. My main concern is the safety of the work force and the community."
The plan
The baseline procedure for the incineration of rockets is a multi-step process. First, at least 95 percent of the agent is drained and sent into a furnace designed to burn liquid agent. Then the rocket is sheared into eight pieces, effectively separating its various parts before they're dropped into a separate furnace system and burned.
This procedure allows for a small "heel" of agent left over after the draining process - no more than 5 percent of the original amount of agent in the rocket - to be burned along with the rocket parts.
This procedure has been endorsed by a committee of the National Research Council, an independent body of scientists. In a 1994 report, the committee wrote that the "system has been demonstrated as a safe and effective disposal process for the stockpile."
But in the same report, published five years before gelled munitions became an issue at Tooele, the committee stressed the importance of separating agent from the other munition parts in the disposal process.
"All disposal systems should be designed to separately process agent, energetics and associated small metal components, large metal parts, and dunnage streams," the committee wrote. The committee called this separation of waste streams "a major safety feature" of the system.
Garrett says the report doesn't take into account the problems posed by gelled rockets. He is convinced that the deactivation furnace, the system designed to handle the munitions parts, can, at the same time, safely destroy a full load of agent.
"After careful study of the deactivation furnace capacity, (officials in the chemical demilitarization program) determined the furnace could effectively destroy the gelled agent with the rest of the rocket component," Garrett said.
Though they can't be drained fully, gelled rockets will be punched to relieve pressure on the agent, reducing the likelihood that it will spray out. The rockets will then be chopped and burned at a rate to be determined in trial burns over the next months.
Beginning Tuesday, the deactivation furnace will undergo a round of testing on substances that are more difficult to destroy than the sarin. During agent trial burns, the facility will attempt to slowly move toward its goal of destroying 34 undrained rockets per hour while staying under emissions standards.
This isn't a far-fetched number, said Jim Grassiano, chief of the governmental facilities section at the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which will review data from the test burns
"It's pretty reasonable," he said. "I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility to get 34 an hour. But the bottom line is that if they end up testing at 17, or 25 an hour, then that's the rate they can operate at."
The history
By April 1999, Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, as the incinerator there is officially known, had destroyed in its three years of operations almost 20,000 sarin-filled M55 rockets. In the month of March alone, it had disposed of more than one thousand of the weapons, along with a number of other projectiles and containers loaded with the lethal agent.
The projectiles were the focus of management's attention at that time, with more than 17,000 of them destroyed that same March. But another issue was grabbing the attention of Army officials: how to process rockets containing sarin that couldn't be drained.
Sarin, or GB, was designed to hang in the air above a battlefield, attacking the nervous and respiratory systems of those who absorb it. The agent was in liquid form when the munitions were filled, but, the Army now believes, a stabilizer added to certain batches of the lethal agent transformed into a gelled or crystallized substance that has made siphoning of the agent at times impossible.
Operators of the prototype incinerator facility on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean hadn't seen such a transformation, the Army claims. As a result, their counterparts in Tooele, the first-generation plant, were caught unaware of a serious challenge, not only to a baseline technology predicated on the separation of the agent from the other waste, but also to the incinerator's state permit.
The Army had two options: either shut down the plant and design a trial burn plan in which they could demonstrate that the deactivation furnace system could handle a higher rate of rockets, or keep it fired up and burn the rockets at the allowable but much slower rate of 1.6 per hour.
With relatively few rockets left to burn, the Army chose the latter.
"With co-processing (of artillery shells and ton-containers) underway, it made more sense to continue slowly with co-processing these rockets, than it did to shut the whole thing down," said Greg Mahall, spokesman for the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization.
Jason Groenewold, an incinerator watchdog, sees the decision as a violation of the permit that caused several problems at the facility.
"Burning gelled rockets jeopardizes worker safety and causes delays, among other problems," he said.
His organization, Families Against Incinerator Risk, and others sued the Army, eventually settling the case after the entire GB campaign was finished early this year.
Mahall, the Army spokesman, acknowledges that the sarin rocket campaign was projected to be a yearlong project and ended up taking three times that. He says that co-processing other munitions helped make up for time lost.
"The original estimates were based purely on theoretical assumptions and took into account very little actual processing experience," he said. "Add to that the fact that (the Johnston Atoll incinerator) never did encounter the gelling that Tooele eventually did. So it was a combination of factors, of which gelled agent played some part (that led to the slippages)."
The future
In the more than three years since gelled rockets became an issue in Utah, the only thing that has changed in the Army's plans for gelled rockets is the speed with which the facility will work.
"Other than the rate at which we process, there are no significant differences in the way we will process rockets," Garrett said. "There have been programmatic lessons learned, which we have implemented related to processing rockets, but not directly associated with processing gelled rockets."
Garrett said the most important factor is that the deactivation furnace system has the capacity to get hot enough to successfully destroy the agent.
Despite Garrett's claims, Williams, the anti-incinerator activist, disagrees. He claims that the addition of explosives, propellant and metal parts aren't taken into account and will cause problems within the furnace.
"That's exactly, why (the National Research Council) said, 'Don't do it,'" he said.
The Army has long held that the Tooele facility could have processed undrained rockets at a faster rate than it did. This belief carries over to Anniston.
"I believe that people who work with this every day have confidence in the robustness of the facility," the Army's Mahall said. "Of course, confidence is one thing, proving out is another."
