An Ohio plant’s recent effort to demonstrate that it can safely dispose of a chemical weapon neutralization byproduct has failed to persuade local activists that the process is safe, the Dayton Daily News reported Tuesday (see GSN, Aug. 6).

The U.S. Army is preparing to neutralize its VX nerve agent stocks in Newport, Indiana, and plans to ship a neutralization byproduct called hydrolysate for additional processing to Perma-Fix, a waste treatment contractor in Dayton, Ohio (see GSN, Aug. 14).  Perma-Fix expects to receive 1 million gallons of hydrolysate from the Army over the course of the chemical demilitarization program and will treat the waste material before discharging it into the local waste water system, according to the Daily News.

In the recent test, Perma-Fix processed two gallons of hydrolysate provided by the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, but local critics said that sample was too small and did not match the composition of hydrolysate expected to arrive from Newport.

“What a waste of taxpayers’ dollars,” said Jane Forrest Redfern of Citizens for the Responsible Destruction of Chemical Weapons in the Miami Valley.  “They were testing apples and they should have been testing oranges,” she said.

Army spokesman Jeffrey Brubaker disagreed.

“We believe it is comparable,” he said (Jim DeBrosse, Dayton Daily News, Sept. 16).

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