Chemical technicians aboard the MV Cape Ray will be using two
specially designed reactors to break the chemicals down in a process
known as hydrolysis.
A United States navy vessel is playing a key role in helping to destroy the most dangerous of Syria's declared chemical weapons.
Over the next three months, chemical technicians aboard the MV Cape Ray will be using two specially designed reactors to break the chemicals down in a process known as hydrolysis.
After the process is complete, Syria's deadly chemicals will have been transformed into relatively harmless toxic waste.
Greg Dyett reports.
(Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)
It was the killing of hundreds of people in a sarin rocket attack in Syria last August that eventually saw at least ten countries agree to be part of a mission to destroy the country's chemical weapons stocks.
Hundreds died in the Ghouta area outside of Damascus, with the Syrian government saying it wasn't responsible.
Some experts questioned whether it was a sarin attack, but a report delivered to the United Nations head Ban Ki Moon removed all doubt.
"The results are overwhelming and indisputable. 85 per cent of the blood samples tested positive for sarin. The findings are beyond doubt and beyond the pale."
Under threat of United States airstrikes, Syria agreed to hand over its chemical weapons in a deal backed by both Russia and the US.
The joint mission involving the UN and staff from the world's chemical weapons monitor, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, took months.
After delays which caused the initial deadline to be missed, the mission has now been able to mark a major milestone.
Sigrid Kaag is the Dutch head of the joint mission.
"Today the joint mission confirms the 100 per cent removal of Syria's declared chemical weapon material. It's a critical day, it's a benchmark in the overall elimination program of Syria's chemical weapons."
She says Syria's most dangerous chemicals - what are called the priority one chemicals - are being destroyed in international waters in the Mediterrean on board the MV Cape Ray.
"It will be destroyed aboard the ship by method of hydrolysis. Other chemicals, select ones, will go to the UK and to Germany. Priority two chemicals have been transloaded already, they will go to Finland for onward destruction in the US. That has been done through a commercial tendering process."
Over the next three months, the chemicals will go into two titanium-lined reactors on board the ship and will be mixed with household chemicals like caustic soda.
It's then a matter of heating the mixture to 100 degrees to degrade the deadly chemicals.
Chemist Martin Boland, from Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, explains.
"They heat the combination of the nerve agent and the water and the sodium hydroxide and bleach to around 100 degrees Celcius and that vastly speeds up the hydrolysis process. It takes around 90 minutes to go from a tonne of nerve agent to 11 tonnes of toxic waste - but it is no longer able to act as a nerve agent."
Destroying the chemicals does not involve putting waste into the ocean.
Martin Boland says the toxic waste will be taken back from the MV Cape Ray to countries in Northern Europe and disposed off in a number of ways.
"Some places the water will be boiled off, the remaining material will be buried in landfill which is specially designed to maintain integrity even though there are toxic chemicals inside. In other places it will just simply be incinerated at around 8,000 degrees Celsius and that material will be carbon dioxide and water by the time it's finished."
When the joint mission celebrated its recent milestone, the US Secretary of State John Kerry stressed there was still work to do.
"Even as we mark this moment of removing 100 per cent of the declared weapons that we understand that are work is not finished to ensure the complete elimination of Syria's CW (chemical weapons) program. There are still some serious issues."
And one of those issues is the use of chlorine gas being unleashed in Syria in barrel bombs.
Martin Boland says that chemical was first used in World War One and while it can definitely harm people, it's not on same scale as the chemicals Syria has given up for disposal.
"The levels of danger that chlorine or phosgene represent as a chemical weapon for civilian population are massively less than even mustard gas, let alone sarin."
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