Significant progress has been made on construction of the primary chemical weapons disposal facility at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, USA.

Steel and rebar are being put in position for the pilot building at the 50-acre site at the depot in Madison County. Preparatory operations began more than three years ago, followed by construction of the pilot plant in summer 2009. The chemical weapons destruction complex will eventually contain 11 buildings.

"Now that we're coming out of the ground with the steel, everybody's enthusiastic about that," site project manager Jeff Brubaker said in early December.

Congress for this fiscal year alloted more than $500 million to the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program for construction of chemical weapons neutralization plants at Blue Grass and at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado. The large appropriation means that construction on the Blue Grass disposal plant should finish by 2016 -- two years earlier than expected -- though all of the machinery needs to be tested.

Destruction of the 523 tons of mustard mustard agent and sarin and VX nerve agents stored at Blue Grass is expected to begin in 2018 and last until 2021, which does not meet either the April 2012 disposal deadline set by the Chemical Weapons Convention or the congressionally mandated destruction end date of 2017.

"We're continually looking for other avenues to accelerate the construction process," Brubaker said. "If we're successful in doing that, we should be able to start destruction sooner."

One possibility for speeding up the destruction process is to use explosives to eliminate a portion of the mustard munitions stored at Blue Grass.

The U.S. Defense Department says that method is the safest way to dispose of those weapons. A decision on the proposal is expected this month.

A congressionally mandated advisory panel has already raised objections to the Army's proposal to detonate 125,000 mustard munitions at the Pueblo Chemical Depot.

The Colorado Citizens Advisory Commission told Army officials in a Dec. 14 letter that it did not approve of its plan to expand the use of explosives in destroying chemical munitions beyond 1,000 shells that are leaking mustard agent.

Pueblo holds 780,000 munitions filled with 2,600 tons of the blister agent.

The advisory commission does not have the ability to halt the Army proposal.

"Why all of a sudden this change nobody heard about till the middle of November?" said Irene Kornelly, chairwoman of the commission, in comments objecting to the detonation proposal.

She said the commission also wants information on how waste produced in the detonation would be utilized.

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