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The United States will help destroy some of Syria’s deadliest chemical weapons. The organization for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons confirmed part of the arsenal would be neutralized aboard a US ship in international waters. This approach would avoid diplomatic, security and environmental problems posed by destruction of chemicals on land.The US offer to help destroy part of the most hazardous chemicals at an offshore vessel has been approved by the OPCW this Saturday. Ralf Trapp, Independent Consultant of Chemical Weapons Disarmament and a former senior officer at the OPCW in The Hague, talked with the Voice of Russia about the potential risks of this complex endeavour.

- How dangerous is this method of destroying chemical arsenals on the ship?

- It is actually not that different from destroying it on land. I should first of all make a very strong point to stress up this is not about sea dumping, it is not about getting rid of chemical weapons in the way it was done in the past. We are talking about running a chemical plant that will actually chemically destroy these agents. And the operation will be done on a ship.

- It is an incinerator, right?

- It is not an incinerator. It is a chemical reaction vessel that will basically treat the agents with water and alkaline or bleach depending on what the agent is and it will generate liquid reaction masses which then will be stored and will afterwards be treated once the operation is finished.

- What are its pros and cons?

- First of all, it is a compact operation where you have everything under one roof so to say, so you have to worry about things a month but only. There are pros – it is easier from a legal perspective to set up this operation, you don’t have to worry about things like licensing and permitting operations of that nature on land in countries.

If we do it at sea, in the international sea, there are certain areas where you can do it without that and so you can actually start operating this sort of facility pretty much right away. But there are cons – you have additional risks. You have to load material on to the ship and of course you are on sea, you are not on land, so if something goes wrong, you have a way of dealing with incidents, it is going to be slightly more complicated and different from what you would do on land. So, there are pros and cons but technically it is not going to be different from doing it on land.

- What are the potential risks for the environment?

- The first risk you have is actually get the material on to the boat and that simply is the normal risk that comes from loading and unloading the container with materials. So, it depends on port facilities, how it is done and prepared.

My understanding is that they are still looking for a location where that can be done but you can’t avoid the situation where you have to load and unload these containers at sea. So, that is one issue to consider.

Once you are at sea, this is pretty much a self-contained operation, I mean you have to take container ship into which you put containers, containing the materials that will contain the reaction masses, you will not have any discharge of reaction products into the sea and in the middle of the ship you will have a reaction in the container that contains the actual reactor, the actual hydrolysis unit.

So you have to worry about the usual things you do in the chemical plant in a chemical operation, what you do if something goes wrong if you have an accident, if you have a spill, how quickly you can decontaminate. But you have to pack that all into the stoke but that could be done. So, basically from that perspective the risks that you are facing are not different from an operation in any other chemical facility.