INDIANA
Army officials Tuesday announced that they are working with Indiana state and federal environmental regulators to develop a plan to accelerate the destruction of more than 1,200 tons of VX nerve agent stored at a depot there.
Part of a post-Sept. 11 effort to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks, the accelerated plan will destroy the Newport Chemical Depot's ton-containers before the current scheduled timeframe of mid-2006.
"Moving forward to destroy the VX safety and as fast as possible will decrease the risk to Indiana citizens and eliminate a potential terrorist target," said Mario Fiori, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installation and Environment.
The Army plans to neutralize the agent with sodium hydroxide and then ship the remaining byproduct to an off-site commercial treatment facility for disposal. These aspects of the disposal process won't change under the accelerated plan, though a more manual than automated process will be used to drain and clean the storage containers.
Since September's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, officials have been evaluating ways to reduce the risk from the storage of chemical weapons. Earlier this year, the Army officials announced an accelerated neutralization program for the chemical stockpile in Aberdeen, Md., which, like Newport, contains only ton-containers of agent.
The Army currently is incinerating chemical weapons in Utah and plans to do the same in Anniston, Oregon and Arkansas. Stockpiles in Colorado and Kentucky are candidates for alternatives to incineration, including neutralization processes.
Despite pushes for neutralization by anti-incinerator groups, the Army has insisted that these processes are not appropriate for a complex stockpile like the one in Anniston, which contains a variety of weapons, including the difficult to disassemble M55 rockets.
