Arsenal Delays Pollution-Control Incinerator Again; New River Valley Asked to Continue Breathing Patiently

RADFORD / NEW RIVER VALLEY — The Radford Army Ammunition Plant, known around here simply as the Arsenal, has delayed completion of its long-promised $145 million energetic-waste incinerator again, pushing the project from an original summer 2025 completion date to June 2026 and now to September 2027.

The facility says the new system will provide a modern, controlled alternative to open burning and nearly eliminate use of its open-burning ground, where hazardous energetic waste associated with gun and rocket propellant production has historically been destroyed outdoors. Construction began in 2023.

Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Mark Haviland attributed the latest delay to extensive safety and quality-control reviews requiring unplanned changes to the design and construction schedule.

Fair enough.

“This is,” after all, “an incinerator for explosive hazardous waste,” our anonymous informant cackled between spits and coughs with the statement.

Nobody around here is demanding that they slap it together out of plywood Friday afternoon because Cor wants the smoke gone by Monday.

What the New River Valley is entitled to ask is why replacing a disposal practice the federal government has regarded as an environmental problem for decades has once again acquired another year.

Open burning of hazardous waste was generally prohibited under federal regulation decades ago, while military energetic waste retained an exemption because explosives presented unusual disposal problems. The practice survived long after alternative technologies became available, and Radford continued operating its permitted burn ground along the New River.

That history matters because the Arsenal does not possess enough public trust to treat another delay as an isolated scheduling inconvenience.

This is the fucking Arsenal.

People around here have stories about the place the way coastal towns have stories about hurricanes.

Some are folklore.

Some are suspicion.

And an uncomfortable amount of the weird shit is sitting in government records.

The facility was built during World War II and remains an important military installation producing propellants and explosives. It has also accumulated a long documented history of catastrophic industrial accidents. A 5,000-pound batch of nitroglycerine exploded in February 1985, killing two workers and leaving a half-acre crater. OSHA's historical investigation likewise records two employee deaths from that explosion.

In 1991, workers Mary Duncan and Ivery Boysaw died from ether poisoning after attempting to clean up liquid ether that had overflowed from a tank. Their families later lost workers' compensation claims after a deputy commissioner ruled that the women had violated safety procedures.

A June 2018 flash fire at the plant injured three workers. Andrew Goad, 42, died several days later from his injuries.

And in February 2025, another explosion occurred inside an ammunition-production area. Nobody was physically injured in that incident, which plant officials cited as evidence that safety protocols had worked.

So when older residents describe explosions, deaths and fucked-up incidents at the Arsenal, this is not necessarily Appalachian telephone.

Some of it has paperwork.

The environmental record supplies more.

A major 2017 ProPublica investigation documented open burning of wastes containing or associated with hazardous substances including lead, mercury, chromium, nitroglycerin and perchlorate. It also reported that an EPA investigation found serious deficiencies in environmental reporting: between 2011 and 2013, operators failed on 287 occasions to self-report smokestack emissions exceeding permit limits. The investigation also documented a 15,000-gallon sulfuric-acid release into containment in 2012 and, months later, a roughly 500-gallon ether release into the New River that was not reported within the required period.

That same reporting found something almost comically basic had been missing from decades of environmental reassurance:

For most of the history of open burning at Radford, nobody had actually been sampling the ambient air at nearby homes and schools to determine what residents themselves were breathing.

That is an interesting approach to the scientific method.

“Are these chemicals reaching the neighborhood?”

“Well, we modeled it.”

“Did you check the neighborhood?”

“No.”

Cardinal News reported this July that a 2017 drone test over the burning area found higher-than-anticipated levels of pollutants including lead and arsenic. It also reported that Virginia DEQ's 2025 Toxics Release Inventory analysis identified BAE Systems at the Arsenal as Virginia's largest on-site emitter of TRI chemicals to the air for 2023.

The EPA's Toxics Release Inventory exists specifically to disclose releases of chemicals capable of producing serious human-health or environmental effects.

Then Hurricane Helene came through.

Flooding in September 2024 ripped open a warehouse and swept 13 chemical totes into the New River. Cardinal News later reported that the containers held dibutyl phthalate; at least three were known to have released their contents, and four totes were still missing six months later. Officials estimated a cumulative release of 1,575 gallons and said the extraordinary river volume diluted the material enough that public health was not jeopardized and no environmental impacts were observed.

Again:

This shit sounds like something Cor would make up for InfoScat.

Unfortunately, somebody already filed the incident report.

And then there is the thyroid question.

That part requires more care than either side sometimes gives it.

ProPublica reported that rates of thyroid disease in three counties surrounding the Arsenal were among Virginia's highest, prompting longstanding community concern that emissions from the plant could be contributing. A later documentary, FALLOUT, centered specifically on local residents reporting thyroid and other health problems near the facility.

There is biologic plausibility behind at least part of that concern. Perchlorate, used in rocket propellants and explosives, can interfere with the thyroid's uptake of iodide, although toxicological research shows that effects depend heavily on exposure level, duration and individual factors such as iodine status.

But—and this distinction matters—no official investigation has established that Arsenal pollution caused the New River Valley's elevated thyroid disease. Cardinal News explicitly noted the absence of an established causal link.

So The Lemon will not say that it did.

The Lemon will say something considerably less exciting and considerably more defensible:

We don't fucking know.

And after decades of releases, open burning, incomplete reporting, high local thyroid-disease rates and historically limited direct community air monitoring, we don't know is itself a legitimate reason to keep asking the question.

Climate and environmental realism cut both ways.

A suspicious correlation is not causation.

Neither is the absence of a completed causal study proof that nothing happened.

Science is not supposed to begin with the answer somebody finds most economically convenient.

The Arsenal's defenders have another legitimate argument. It remains a major defense-production facility, and hazardous energetic materials really are difficult to handle safely. The Army says it has reduced open-burning waste by roughly half since 2017 and undertaken other environmental improvements.

Good.

That is what should happen.

The New River Valley does not need the Arsenal abolished in order to insist that the Arsenal stop externalizing the dirtier parts of national defense into the air and water surrounding the people who happen to live beside it.

Local workers should have safe jobs.

The military can have its propellant.

The country can have its ammunition.

And residents should not have to treat “probably safe” as the regional air-quality standard because somebody in Washington wants the shells produced cheaply.

This is one of the oldest little tricks in industrial economics:

The institution receives the product.

The contractor receives the money.

The community receives the uncertainty.

That uncertainty also helps explain why the new waste-processing system matters even to residents skeptical of incineration itself. Environmental advocates have argued that safer alternatives to open burning exist and have criticized permits allowing older incinerators and open burning to continue alongside new equipment.

The Army's own position is that the new Contaminated Waste Processor will nearly eliminate open burning.

If so, finish the motherfucker.

Safely.

Correctly.

But finish it.

Because September 2027 will arrive forty-seven years after federal regulators broadly banned open burning of hazardous waste, while the military exception continued turning what was supposed to be an unusual necessity into a multigenerational local institution.

Around here, children have grown up, graduated, had children and sent those children to school while the Arsenal kept burning waste across the river.

The incinerator has now been delayed twice.

The smoke has apparently remained right on schedule.