My Dad gave me some cool souvenirs/momentos from his chemical weapons career.

Thought some of you might find this interesting.

He worked for TVA in Muscle Shoals with the National Fertilizer Development Center when I was very young. Around 1988 that work ended and TVA had a lot of chemists with not alot to do. He and others got assigned to projects doing chemical weapons destruction as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention treaties.


He worked all over the U.S. Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Dugway Proving Ground, Hawthorne Army Depot, Anniston Army Depot, Black Hills Army Depot, Pueblo Chemical Depot, Pine Bluff Arsenal, and where these come from... Newport Chemical Depot. Here's a short article about the Newport site. C&EN

The small one is a label/tag off a VX ton container, and the larger one is off one of the larger tanks that they filled the ton containers from.

Decided to make an ornament and a coaster out of them instead of just storing them in a box in the closet, etc.






VX ton container




VX large tank

quote:

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"Newport's stockpile has been safely eliminated, which brings the U.S. one step closer to fulfilling the commitment of destroying our nation's chemical weapons," according to Conrad Whyne, director of the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency.

The Newport Chemical Depot has neutralized 1,269 tons of liquid chemical agent VX since operations began in May 2005. The chemical destruction process mixes the VX with hot sodium hydroxide in a reactor, and it generates a caustic wastewater, or hydrolysate, which is shipped to Veolia Environmental Services in Port Arthur, Texas, for final treatment by incineration (C&EN, March 24, page 29). The final shipment of hydrolysate will take place in the next couple of weeks.

The completion of the work at Newport brings the total amount of chemical weapons destroyed by the U.S. to about 17,000 tons, or about 55% of its total declared stockpile. Destruction of chemical weapons continues at sites in Anniston, Ala.; Pine Bluff, Ark.; Tooele, Utah; and Umatilla, Ore. Two additional destruction sites are under development in Pueblo, Colo., and Blue Grass, Ky.

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