By C. Todd Lopez
Army News Service
PORTSMOUTH, Va. , Jan. 3, 2014 – Some 64 specialists from
the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center are expected to depart for the
Mediterranean in about two weeks aboard an American-owned ship, the Cape Ray,
to destroy chemical weapons from Syria.
The nearly 650-foot-long ship, now here, will travel to a
yet-to-be specified location in the Mediterranean, where it will take on about
700 metric tons of both mustard gas and "DF compound," a component of
the nerve agent sarin gas. Specialists will then use two new, recently
installed “field deployable hydrolysis systems” to neutralize the chemicals.
Aboard the Cape Ray will be 35 mariners, about 64 chemical
specialists from Edgewood, Md., a security team, and a contingent from U.S.
European Command. It's expected the operational portion of the mission will
take about 90 days.
During a visit here yesterday, Frank Kendall, undersecretary
of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said preparations began
before the United States even knew it was committed to the mission -- or that
the mission would ever materialize.
“There was a recognition that something was going to happen
in Syria, in all likelihood that would require us to do something with those
chemical materials that were known to be there,” he said.
In December 2012, a request was made to determine what could
be done if the U.S. was asked to participate in destruction of chemical weapons
from Syria.
By the end of January 2013, a team with the Joint Project
Manager for Elimination and the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center had
evaluated existing technology and configurations for neutralization of chemical
weapons and recommended using the hydrolysis process. Construction of a
deployable system began in February, and the first prototype was available in
June. A second was available in September.
“We could have waited to see what happened and then reacted
to that, or we could have moved out ahead of time and then prepared for what
might happen or was likely to happen,” Kendall said. “Fortunately … we took the
latter course.”
Aboard the ship, an environmentally sealed tent contains two
FDHS units, which will operate 24 hours a day in parallel to complete the
chemical warfare agent neutralization mission.
Each unit costs about $5 million and contains built-in
redundancy and a titanium-lined reactor for mixing the chemical warfare agents
with the chemicals that will neutralize them.
About 130 gallons of mustard gas can be neutralized at a
time, over the course of about two hours, for instance, said Adam Baker, with
the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, Edgewood, Md.
The FDHS systems can, depending on the material, process
between 5 to 25 metric tons of material a day. With two systems, that means as
much as 50 metric tons a day of chemical warfare agents can be destroyed. The
mission requires disposal of 700 metric tons of material. But the plan is not
to start out on the first day at full speed, Baker said.
“There is a ramp-up period,” he noted. "It's going to
be a slow start. We're going to go very deliberately and safely.”
Rob Malone, with the Joint Project Manager for Elimination
at Edgewood, Md., said the two chemical warfare agents will be neutralized with
reagents such as bleach, water or sodium hydroxide.
“They are doing a chemical hydrolysis process. It brings the
chemical agent together with a reagent, another chemical,” Malone said. “It
creates a chemical reaction that basically destroys the chemical agent in and
of itself.”
The result of that neutralization process will create about
1.5 million gallons of a toxic “effluent” that must be disposed of, but that
cannot be used as a chemical weapon. Malone said the effluent is similar to
other toxic hazardous compounds that industrial processes generate. There is a
commercial market worldwide for disposing of such waste, he noted.
Baker said the effluent will be acidic and will be
PH-adjusted to bring it up to “above neutral,” as part of the process. The end
result will be a liquid that is caustic, similar to commercial drain openers,
he added.
Malone said the operational plan includes a cycle of six
days of disposal plus one day for maintenance of the equipment. On board will
be about 220 6,600-gallon containers that will hold the reagents used in the
disposal process, and will also be used afterward to hold the effluent.
“Everything will be kind of contained on the ship throughout
the entire process,” Malone said.
The U.S. has never disposed of chemical weapons on board a
ship before. But it has spent years disposing of its own chemical weapons on
land, using the same process that the FDHS uses. The chemical process is not
new, and neither is the technology. The format, field-deployable, is new,
however. The platform, aboard a ship, is also new. These additions to the
process have created challenges for the team.
“This has not been done on this platform, not been done at
sea,” Baker said. “But it is taking the established operations we've done at
several land sites domestically and internationally and is applying them here.”
In the United States, the U.S. military has been destroying
its own chemical weapons for years at places like Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.,
and the recently-closed Pine Bluff Arsenal, Ala. Lessons from those facilities
and others were used to develop the process that will be used aboard the Cape
Ray to destroy Syrian chemical weapons.
The process for disposing of mustard gas was used at
Aberdeen Proving Ground. The process for disposing of DF compound was taken
from Pine Bluff Arsenal, Baker said. The processes and technologies from those
locations were scaled down to make them transportable.
“So there is no mystery about the process,” Kendall said.
“It is a slightly different scale that we are doing it at here. We had fixed
installations that had hydrolysis units that could do this job. But what we did
not have was a ‘transportable, field deployable’ [system], the words we're
using for these systems, that could be moved somewhere else.”
Malone, who has 20 years of experience destroying chemical
weapons for the United States, said doing on a ship what he has done on land
for two decades required some additional thought and effort.
“We had to figure out on the Cape Ray how to operate in
three dimensions,” he said. The FHDS systems are inside tents inside the ship,
for example. But the chemical weapons may be loaded on the ship on the deck
above, and additional materials will be a deck below the FDHS equipment. On
land, everything is spread out and on one level, he said.
“That's been the significant challenge and things we've had
to overcome to get the Cape Ray ready for deployment,” he said.
Additionally, vibration studies were done to learn how lab
equipment would operate on board a ship, he said. And the equipment had to be
modified to anchor it into the ship using chains.
The U.S. chemical weapons demilitarization program often
handles munitions that contain chemical weapons, such as rockets and
projectiles that include a casing and explosive as well as the chemical
component.
“That's that part that really limits throughput a lot of
time, the de-mating of the explosive from the chemical agent and the body,”
Malone said.
But aboard the Cape Ray, the mission will be different. It
is not munitions that are being demilitarized, but liquid chemical agents.
“This can be done fairly quickly because all of the material
we are receiving are going to be in a bulk configuration,” Malone said. “It's
in large vessels, easily accessible, and for us it gives us a very high
throughput.”
Rick Jordan, captain of the Cape Ray, a mariner for 40 years
and an employee of contractor Keystone Shipping Company, said for this mission
his crew expanded from 29 to 35. The additional six will support mainly what he
calls “hotel services” on board the ship.
“We've got some really good folks on here that know how to
train, and we've been training them,” he said. “They've got all kinds of
shipboard damage control, damage control training and that sort of thing.”
He also said there is plenty of support for spill response
as well as for fire suppression.
“The whole key here is teamwork,” he said. “There has been
an unbelievable amount of teamwork in this whole process, from the Maritime
Administration, Military Sealift Command, to the Keystone Shipping Company. I'm
humbled by what is going on here. We've had about three or four days of hard
training together where we've been making mariners out of them, and they've
been making chemical destruction folks out of us. And we're going to continue
to train. The whole trip will be a combination of production, training and
being ready for the worst case scenario.”
Jordan said he has not yet received sailing orders, but
estimated the time to sail to the center of the Mediterranean Sea at about 10
days. The mission will last 90 days.
That 90-day mission has about 45 days built in for “down
days” due to bad weather. So the mission could be shorter.
“Weather is the single most important factor as a mariner
that I have got to consider,” Jordan said. “The good news for the Cape Ray is
we have lots of things to mitigate weather on board.”
He said the ship is equipped with stabilizers to dampen any
roll. He also said that because the ship really has no destination, but is
rather meant to serve as a platform, he can navigate around weather if need be.
Sea trials for the mission have already begun, and the Cape
Ray will do more sea trials before it departs on its mission in about two
weeks. It’s expected the mission will include the neutralization of about 700
metric tons of chemical weapon agents. Those agents will be transferred to the
Cape Ray from both Danish and Norwegian ships in a process expected to take
about one or two days.
“Exactly where and how that process will take place has not
been finalized yet,” Kendall said.
U.S. Navy assets will provide security for the ship while it
conducts operations, Kendall said.
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