Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo: Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

193 Pages·2012·8.72 MB·English

Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies

for the
Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction
Pilot Plants
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the
Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction
Pilot Plants

Committee on Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and
Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

Board on Army Science and Technology

Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences

THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, D.C.
www.nap.edu

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants
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NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board
of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the
National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of
Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their
special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.

This study was supported by Contract No. W911NF-11-C-0033 between the National
Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Army. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or
recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the organizations or agencies that provided support for the
project.

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-25985-9
International Standard Book Number-10: 0-309-25985-1

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Copyright 2012 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants
Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

COMMITTEE ON ASSESSMENT OF AGENT MONITORING STRATEGIES
FOR THE BLUE GRASS AND PUEBLO CHEMICAL AGENT DESTRUCTION
PILOT PLANTS

CHARLES E. KOLB, Chair, Aerodyne Research, Inc., Billerica, Massachusetts
JESSE L. BEAUCHAMP (NAS), California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
ROBERT A. BEAUDET, University of Southern California, Pasadena
JOAN B. BERKOWITZ, Farkas Berkowitz and Company, Washington, D.C.
HAO CHEN, Ohio University, Athens
ADRIENNE T. COOPER, Florida Agricultural and Mechnical University, Tallahassee
FACUNDO M. FERNANDEZ, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
ROBERT D. GIBBONS (IOM), University of Chicago
JOHN A. MCLEAN, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
MAX D. MORRIS, Iowa State University, Ames
DONALD W. MURPHY (NAE), Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies (retired),
Davis, California
C. SHANE REESE, Brigham Young University, Mapleton, Utah
LORENZ R. RHOMBERG, Gradient, Cambridge, Massachusetts
ALBERT A. VIGGIANO, Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland AFB, New Mexico

Staff

HARRISON T. PANNELLA, Study Director
NIA D. JOHNSON, Senior Research Associate
ANN F. LARROW, Research Assistant

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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

BOARD ON ARMY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ALAN H. EPSTEIN, Chair, Pratt & Whitney, East Hartford, Connecticut
DAVID M. MADDOX, Vice Chair, Independent Consultant, Arlington, Virginia
DUANE ADAMS, Independent Consultant, Carnegie Mellon University (retired),
Arlington, Virginia
ILESANMI ADESIDA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MARY E. BOYCE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
EDWARD C. BRADY, Strategic Perspectives, Inc., Fort Lauderdale, Florida
W. PETER CHERRY, Independent Consultant, Ann Arbor, Michigan
EARL H. DOWELL, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
JULIA D. ERDLEY, Pennsylvania State University, State College
LESTER A. FOSTER, Electronic Warfare Associates, Herndon, Virginia
JAMES A. FREEBERSYSER, BBN Technology, St. Louis Park, Minnesota
RONALD P. FUCHS, Independent Consultant, Seattle, Washington
W. HARVEY GRAY, Independent Consultant, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
JOHN J. HAMMOND, Lockheed Martin Corporation (retired), Fairfax, Virginia
RANDALL W. HILL, JR., University of Southern California Institute for Creative
Technologies, Playa Vista
JOHN W. HUTCHINSON, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
MARY JANE IRWIN, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
ROBIN L. KEESEE, Independent Consultant, Fairfax, Virginia
ELLIOT D. KIEFF, Channing Laboratory, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
WILLIAM L. MELVIN, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Smyrna
ROBIN MURPHY, Texas A&M University, College Station
SCOTT PARAZYNSKI, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston
RICHARD R. PAUL, Independent Consultant, Bellevue, Washington
JEAN D. REED, Independent Consultant, Arlington, Virginia
LEON E. SALOMON, Independent Consultant, Gulfport, Florida
JONATHAN M. SMITH, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
MARK J.T. SMITH, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
MICHAEL A. STROSCIO, University of Illinois, Chicago
DAVID A. TIRRELL, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
JOSEPH YAKOVAC, President, JVM LLC, Hampton, Virginia

Staff

BRUCE A. BRAUN, Director
CHRIS JONES, Financial Manager
DEANNA P. SPARGER, Program Administrative Coordinator

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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

Preface

More than 25 years ago, in 1986, the U.S. Army began destruction of its nearly
30,000-ton legacy of stockpiled chemical agents, stored in approximately 3 million
individual munitions as well as numerous bulk agent containers. The nation’s chemical
weapons demilitarization effort has succeeded in destroying the chemical munitions and
bulk agent stored at six of the eight chemical agent depots located in the continental
United States. Chemical weapons that had been deployed abroad and relocated to a
storage depot on Johnston Atoll, southwest of Hawaii, have also been successfully
destroyed. To date, 90 percent of the original U.S. stockpile has been safely destroyed.
Six of the eight continental chemical stockpiles, as well as the Johnson Atoll site,
contained large numbers of assembled chemical weapons as well as bulk agent
containers, while the other two continental sites stored only bulk agent containers. The
demilitarization facilities that successfully dealt with both assembled weapons and bulk
agent at five storage sites used several types of specialized furnaces to incinerate
chemical agent and energetic materials and decontaminate metal munitions casings, bulk
agent containers, and many agent-contaminated secondary waste streams. The two
demilitarization facilities dealing only with bulk agent used chemical neutralization
(aqueous-based hydrolysis) reactions to fragment and detoxify the chemical agents and a
combination of decontamination solutions and steam to clean the agent containers.
Demilitarization plants for the two remaining chemical weapons depots, which
contain the remaining 10 percent of the nation’s chemical agent in assembled chemical
projectiles and rockets, are currently under construction. These facilities are funded
separately under the DOD’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment (ACWA)
program and implemented by a dedicated U.S. Army Element. Local concerns about
incineration of chemical weapons forced the Army to design these facilities without the
large furnaces used at other assembled chemical weapons demilitarization plants to
destroy agent and energetics and to decontaminate many secondary waste materials. The
lack of high-throughput furnaces to destroy or decontaminate secondary waste materials
creates a need to easily and reliably determine which waste materials are contaminated
with agent and if initial decontamination efforts have succeeded. Demilitarization facility
closure activities might also be expedited if tools, equipment, and building surfaces could
be monitored easily and reliably for agent contamination.
While the Army has developed and successfully used methods to detect chemical
agent contamination of various materials, these tend to be indirect and time consuming.
Recent advances in analytical instrumentation suggest that it may be feasible to deploy
robust portable instruments that can detect and characterize chemical agent contamination
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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants
viii PREFACE
of a wide variety of materials in real time. Formed under the auspices of the Board on
Army Science and Technology (BAST), the Committee on Assessment of Agent
Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot
Plants (ACWA Monitoring Committee) was appointed by the National Research Council
to survey the capabilities of newly available analytical instrumentation, and to assess how
such capabilities might be deployed to better characterize chemical agent contamination
of secondary waste materials during agent destruction operations and provide a real-time
monitoring tool for contaminated equipment and construction materials during closure
activities at the last two U.S. chemical weapons stockpile demilitarization facilities.
In the present report, the ACWA Monitoring Committee presents its findings and
recommendations to the Program Manager for Assembled Chemical Weapons
Alternatives (PMACWA), whose staff is responsible for the construction, operation, and
closure of the last two U.S. chemical weapons stockpile demilitarization facilities. During
its deliberations, the committee benefited from the insights and analyses of senior ACWA
personnel and wishes to specifically acknowledge detailed inputs about anticipated
ACWA operational procedures and requirements from C.J. Anderson and J.M. Kiley. The
committee also benefited greatly from the efforts of BAST’s professional staff, including
the study director, Harrison T. Pannella, senior research associate Nia D. Johnson, and
research assistant and logistics expert Ann F. Larrow.

Charles E. Kolb, Chair
Committee on Assessment of Agent
Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass
and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction
Pilot Plants

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Assessment of Agent Monitoring Strategies for the Blue Grass and Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plants

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their
diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by
the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Report Review Committee. The purpose of this
independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the
institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the
report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the
study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect
the integrity of the deliberative process. We wish to thank the following individuals for
their review of this report:

Charles K. Bayne, Consultant;
John I. Brauman, NAS, Stanford University;
Robert B. Cody, JEOL USA, Inc.;
R. Graham Cooks, Purdue University;
Gary S. Groenewold, Idaho National Laboratory;
M. Douglas LeVan, Vanderbilt University;
Fred W. McLafferty, NAS, Cornell University;
W. Leigh Short, Consultant (retired); and
G. Geoffrey Vining, Virginia Tech.

Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments
and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations nor
did they see the final draft of the report before its release. The review of this report was
overseen by Hyla S. Napadensky, Napadensky Energetics Inc. (retired). Appointed by the
NRC, she was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this
report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review
comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report

rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution.

ix
Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.