A U.S. National Academies advisory panel has recommended using a mobile unit already operated by the Army to destroy leaking and heavily corroded mustard agent munitions at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, the Pueblo Chieftain reported last week (see GSN, May 14).
The depot plans to mechanically disassemble most of its 780,000 mustard munitions and empty their chemical contents into a heated neutralization solution. However, the installation is expected to rely on separate technology to detonate and neutralize the handful of weapons that could pose a hazard in the standard destruction procedure.
The depot to date has uncovered 537 leaking mustard munitions and encased the weapons in steel cylinders; workers are expected to find roughly 1,000 such weapons over the course of the destruction project, said Richard Ayen, a retired engineer who chaired the panel.
A report issued by the committee recommends use of the Explosive Destruction System II to destroy the leaking artillery shells and mortar rounds. The system would destroy the weapons at a slower pace than alternative destruction methods, but the unit's $5 million cost is only 10 percent of the expense of some competing systems (see GSN, Nov. 20, 2006).
The technology has already been employed at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, the Chieftain reported. Workers would place explosive charges on individual munitions, detonate the weapon in the unit's containment chamber and then add compounds to the chamber that would neutralize the mustard blister agent.
Research is under way to determine whether depot personnel could destroy leaking munitions in the chamber without removing the weapons from their steel casing, Ayen said. The Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, which is set to manage chemical demilitarization activities at Pueblo, "said that [the capability] would be nice to have but it was not absolutely necessary," he said (John Norton, Pueblo Chieftain, May 28).