MOSCOW. Aug 23 (Interfax-AVN) - Highly safe technologies will be used at Russia's first full-cycle facility for recycling chemical weapons, located in the village of Gorny in the Saratov region.
"We won't turn anything into bitumen. We have not even considered using such a technology," Russian Ammunition Agency chief Zinovy Pak told Izvestia newspaper in an interview published on Friday.
Barrels containing lewisite are kept in storehouses that are directly linked to the recycling facility, Pak said. They will be put into special containers and moved by a conveyor into a hermetic chamber. There, the barrel will be broken and the lewisite mixed with liquids to produce a substance of second-grade risk. Similar substances such as benzol, dichloroethane and aniline are widely used in chemical enterprises.
Metal barrels will be washed by the solutions that are used for decomposing lewisite. They will subsequently be burned in high- temperature stoves. Thanks to it, the barrels' inner surface will be fully relieved from remains of the stock. After that, it will be safe to remelt the metal in a system provided by Germany. The system is to be put in operation together with the facility's second section.
Stocks resulting from the lewisite destruction will be stored at special warehouses built at the facility. Later they will be transported for reprocessing to other enterprises of the Ammunition Agency.
"Competitions will be held on a commercial basis to determine the enterprise that will reprocess the "waste." Arsenic that results from further reprocessing is of great demand in the microelectronic industry, and its production will be quite profitable from the economic point of view," Pak said.