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TOOELE COUNTY -- High-tech equipment has arrived in Utah that's intended to give the Army a safe way to do something that would otherwise be very dangerous.
The plan is to blow up corroded munitions containing chemical weapons. Officials say they can do it with no harm to people or the environment.
"I am 100-percent confident it will work, based on the design of it," said Jim Grgich, who is managing the effort at the Army's chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele County.
The plan is to blow-up about 300 artillery shells and mortar rounds that contain mustard agent. It's a big change of direction at the incinerator complex. For 15 years, they been destroying Utah's share of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile -- 1.1 million explosive weapons containing toxic chemical agents.
The DAVINCH will destroy approximately 350 mustard-agent-filled munitions that are badly deteriorated or have leaked in the past.
The primary technique has been to cut the munitions open, drain the agents and send the materials to two separate furnaces. That process will be finished later this year.
"We're about 97-percent complete of the original stockpile," said Ted Ryba, U.S. Army project manager for the Deseret Chemical Depot.
But the plant's operators were surprised to discover several hundred munitions that were considered too corroded and too unstable to put through the incinerator system. "We possibly could have had a potential detonation or a situation where somebody could have been injured," Grgich said.
The solution they hit upon is to wrap the munitions with explosives and detonate them inside a chamber that's engineered to contain the explosion. The chamber is built by Kobe Steel in Japan and is known by the acronym, DAVINCH, Detonation of Ammunition in a Vacuum Integrated Chamber.
It's actually two chambers, one nesting inside the other, with a total weight of 160,000 pounds. The door alone weighs 30,000 pounds.
There are four DAVINCH systems currently in operation—one in Japan, another in Belgium and two in China—and they have successfully and safely destroyed more than 5,400 chemical weapons.
The Army provided video of a test conducted in Japan, with a detonation nearly identical to those that will take place in Utah. On the video, the system appears to work perfectly. A large boom can be heard and the chamber vibrates noticeably, but nothing is seen emerging from the explosion.
The chamber is fitted with an elaborate filtration system to handle any gases produced by the explosion.
"In the event that we do see (mustard) agent in that off-gas system," Grgich said, "we have the ability to contain it before it's released to the environment. We have the ability to continuously re-circulate that until it is clean."
The system is currently sitting in a warehouse in Salt Lake. Intermountain Rigging and HeavyHaul has been contracted to deliver 12 truckloads of equipment associated with the project.
IRH's drivers and workers have been fitted with gas masks so they can help set up the system once they deliver it to the Army incinerator complex.
The detonation chamber is expected to be moved to Tooele County over the weekend. Testing is planned to take place this summer, and detonations are expected in September. The plan is still awaiting final approval from state and federal agencies.
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E-mail: hollenhorst@ksl.com
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