As the Army's chemical weapons incinerator switches to a new effort, destroying spray tanks filled with deadly VX nerve agent, a controversy over unusual plant emissions may be nearing resolution.
The spray tank project started Friday at the incinerator, located near Stockton, Tooele County. Stored at Deseret Chemical Depot are more than 800 container tanks, each holding 160 gallons of VX. The material is so toxic that if a drop smaller than the period at the end of this sentence were to settle on a person's hand, it would be deadly.
A demonstration test showing how to destroy the spray tanks is scheduled for August, said Chuck Sprague, depot spokesman.
One of two liquid incinerators used to burn nerve agent, LIC-1, remains shut down. It was closed on July 17 "when a compound with characteristics similar to VX agent was detected on the main furnace exhaust stack," Sprague added in a press release.
While LIC-1 is idle, a second liquid incinerator is being used to process VX agent and burn up spent decontamination solution. All furnaces were shut down when the strange vapors were detected, but LIC-2 and the metal parts furnace went back to work on Wednesday.
At first, plant officials were suspicious that mortar used in a recent rebricking of LIC-1 was to blame. The assertion drew sharp comments from activists worried about safety.
"Either VX nerve agent or its 'evil twin' came out of that smokestack for three days, and the Army is trying to claim it's no big deal," Jason Groenewold, director of the Health Environment Alliance of Utah, said in a written statement.
As recently as Monday afternoon, he added, monitors showed the material at 14 times the allowable concentrations for VX.
Marty Gray, manager of the state's Chemical Demilitarization Section, said that if VX had been released at the plant, the levels detected were not dangerous. But he emphasized it was not VX. "We know that it's not VX" because all detector devices agreed on that.
The fact that a false alarm rang does not mean that whatever was released is as dangerous as VX or nearly that dangerous, he said. The monitors search for particular compounds, and anything containing those compounds will set off the alarms.
But many other types of material could have the same compounds — even everyday products.
In past years, when the plant was burning GB nerve agent (sarin), "they used to have false alarms a lot," Gray said.
"With VX it's fairly rare that they have them."
The alarm was in a common smokestack that handles different parts of the incinerator. So how do regulators know LIC-1 was the origin?
"You know what, we don't know for sure," Gray said in a telephone interview Sunday. "They shut down that furnace." As temperatures fell, "the interferant went down." They concluded that was the source.
"We thought they should have continued to look at other furnaces and we asked them to look at other data." Officials are poring over records from around the time of the alarm, looking for any other suspicious signs. They will check old data from the Depot Area Air Monitoring System tubes.
When processing resumed at other parts of the plant, if alarms had rung or interferant had shown up in the DAAMS tubes, "they would have been shut back down," Gray said. But that didn't happen.
Groenewold is upset that Gray won't give him copies of the data they are studying. "They will not release any information to me, which I find just astonishing," he said.
Gray said when the state carries out an inspection, as it did after the alarm went off, "we keep that (data) confidential until we have done what we are going to do." That could include some type of enforcement action, if the state decides anything happened that was contrary to the plant's operating permit. But nothing has shown up so far that might lead in that direction.
While they are studying the material, it is in a status called "enforcement confidential."
E-mail: bau@desnews.com