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Well into the 1980s the Radford Army Ammunition plant was still re-processing WW2 cannon powder (~30% nitrocellulose) to make both small arms and rocket solid propellants.
The old stuff was stored under water. They may have finally run out.
The actual manufacture of the nitrocellulose from scratch is the most dangerous part of the whole process (heat is realeased as the cellulose is reacted and the process must be cooled and controlled carefully). Once you are past that step things get a lot safer, but in the early 1980s an explosion at the plant killed a truck driver, demolished the truck, and made a decent crater in the road as cakes of nitrocellulose were moved from one process building to another and detonated.
The blast was heard a couple mountain ridges away in Blacksburg at Virginia Tech as a low rumble.
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