About two dozen demonstrators rallied Monday on the steps of the Utah Capitol, demanding Gov. Mike Leavitt block the further incineration of chemical weapons in Tooele County.
Many of the protesters were children. Organized by the group Families Against Incinerator Risk, the children stood beside long lines of taped-together petitions that backers said bore the signatures of more than 5,000 Utahns. The petitions were given to Leavitt's office after the rally.The protesters aren't opposed to destroying the millions of pounds of nerve and blister agent stored at the Deseret Chemical Depot 40 miles west of Salt Lake City, said Jason Groenewold, director of FAIR. "We're advocating for the use of safe alternate technologies."
He called for Leavitt to order the incinerator to stop operation while new technologies are investigated. Asked if the governor has responded to FAIR's concerns, he said Leavitt defers to the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste, which early-on "got in the habit of permitting this facility."
According to Groenewold, the Army's $1 billion incinerator is not working as designed.
FAIR's Chip Ward added that original plans called for the most dangerous munitions in the stockpile, M55 rockets, to be cut open and drained, with separate furnaces burning the nerve agent and cleansing the metal parts. But now they're fed into the incinerator whole, he charged.
"I'm demonstrating . . . to protect people's health from the incinerator open chimney," said Rachel Silverstone, 9, a Salt Lake City fourth-grader from Lowell School who carried a placard opposing the incinerator. Several other students on the steps also were from that school.
In August, a report by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, cast doubt on the value of alternative methods of destroying chemical weapons, concluding that none of the proposed methods can ensure that agent or other hazardous material will not be released. Alternative methods would be expensive, the report says. But it adds that the Department of Defense should continue to study alternatives.
Groenewold said the council was working under a congressional deadline and could not have the advantage of all the data from tests that were recently completed. The alternatives are better than incineration, he added.
Vicki Varela, spokeswoman for Leavitt, said the governor "has long thought, based on scientific research, that it's better for our citizens to destroy these chemical weapons" than for the weapons to be "sitting out in the desert creating permanent risk."
On the subject of alternative methods, she said the Environmental Protection Agency has carried out elaborate analyses "and their numbers show that Tooele is the cleanest incinerator in the country."
Incinerator officials did immediately return a telephone request for comments.