January 2010

What do sunshine and the Cold War have in common? Well, the short answer is Pueblo, Colorado.

Pueblo’s wealth of sunshiny days—over 300 each year—plus the eager-to-revamp Pueblo Chemical Depot may just create the perfect combination for solar energy producers.

The Pueblo Chemical Depot (pronounced locally as de POH instead of the more commonly DEE poh) sits just east of Pueblo on nearly 23,000 acres—a plentitude of land for solar panels.

For those P.U.L.P. readers born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War occupied much of the second half of the 20^th century. Basically, the Communist oligarchs in the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) competed against the U.S. military-industrial complex to see which country could amass the most weapons. With the usual logic that accompanies war, as weapons were collected, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. simultaneously created agreements over the destruction of the same weapons. This is where Pueblo enters the story.

The Pueblo Chemical Depot, known by many different names over the years, has both stored, and been the place of destruction for, a variety of weapons. The Depot has housed chemical weapons—known in our current lexicon as WMD—since 1952, about a decade after the Depot first opened. “Since then, highly trained technicians have quietly kept watch for nearly 60 years over hundreds of thousands of 155mm and 105mm projectiles as well as 4.2-inch mortar rounds, or what was at one time about seven percent of the U.S. chemical weapons inventory,” says Thomas Schultz, a U.S. Army spokesperson for the Depot’s Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant.

According to globalsecurity.org, the Chemical Depot has 780,078 weapons with about 2,611 tons of mustard agent, which represents around 8.5 percent of the national chemical stockpile. The weapons are stored in canisters, which are then stored in strangely named “igloos.” While there are 922 storage igloos, only 102 are being used to store chemical weapons.

In the last decade, the Pueblo Chemical Depot was the site for the destruction of intermediate-range missiles—part of the INF treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. More recently, our government signed the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty with more than 180 other nations that called for the destruction of chemical weapons. Before that work could begin in Pueblo, the Army—after the insistence of Pueblo citizens—had to find a friendly, incinerator-free way to demilitarize (military euphemism for “destroy”) Pueblo’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

In 2002, the Defense Department selected neutralization followed by bio-treatment as the technology used in Pueblo for disposal of chemical weapons. Bechtel was awarded a contract for a pilot project at the Depot in using this “neutralization” technology, and they have been building this “weapon destroyer” for the past several years. “Work first began on the plant in 2004 and construction continues to progress on a variety of structures,” says Schultz, “When the plant comes online in January 2015, it will operate on a 24/7 schedule until the last of the weapons are destroyed sometime in 2017.”

Around the same time, the Pueblo Chemical Depot was also identified for realignment by the Defense Department. Realignment means that the Depot wouldn’t close but would need to be repurposed.

Part of the re-use work called for the creation of a local authority. In 1994, the state created the Pueblo Depot Authority. The Authority’s mission, according to Chuck Finley, Executive Director, “includes job creation, adding property to the local tax role and integrating the resources of the Depot into the region’s economic development opportunities.”

While they are not involved in the destruction of weapons, the Authority will help to escort the Depot into its post-weapon future. According to Finley, “The Authority firmly supports the goal of alternative energy—both to lower our [society’s] dependence on fossil fuels and as a ‘green’ economic development sector.”

The ideal of turning Cold-War-tainted land into something more life-affirming will not happen overnight. But, there are some successful precedents for such a lofty recycling project. For example, Rocky Flats, an infamous nuclear weapons facility west of Denver, is now the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

The project will also not be easy. The Authority and other local officials will have to work with a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—from Pueblo County to the DOD, FRREC and other anagrammed federal agencies—to bring this progressive vision to life.

There is also some competition. The Depot land mass, in different ways, is competing with both the San Luis Valley and land surrounding Fort Carson. The San Luis Valley has long been considered one of the best (and sunniest) places in the nation for solar energy, yet new research may actually show Pueblo to have a greater solar concentration than our neighbors to the southwest. However, the San Luis Valley has another large advantage over Pueblo County. The nearly new Interior Secretary Ken Salazar grew up there and still considers it home.

The Front Range Renewal Energy Consortium (FRREC)—made up of the Front Range military and federal installations and facilities—has identified both the US Army Pueblo Chemical Depot and land surrounding Fort Carson for renewable energy project opportunities.  A document from FRREC, sent to P.U.L.P. by FRREC Director Lawrence Povanska, outlines the benefits of both Fort Carson and Depot land.

The positive points for the Pueblo Depot, according to the document, are: “very flat land with high solar exposure; endorsed by County Commissioners; close to WAPA, Tri-States, and Xcel transmission lines; and [has] on-site easement to Black Hills.”

Finley, from the local Authority, agrees. “The physical attributes of the land at the Depot are well suited for a solar facility,” he says. “It is relatively flat with a south-facing orientation. It is unobstructed by tall buildings and vegetation. These features promote the generation of solar energy.”

Beyond these natural attributes, transmission lines are an essential—albeit unsexy—component to any large-scale alternative energy project. There must be a way to share the energy once it is harnessed. “There are major transmission lines just off the east, west, and south boundaries of the Depot,” Finley explains, “and the lines have the available capacity to carry additional electricity.”

This story is complicated, as is anything involving the federal government and military, yet as Finley describes, “It is a great story with lots of twists.” The well-known Italian author Umberto Eco wrote a children’s book where people turn unused missile shells into flower vases. While Eco’s story is fiction, Pueblo is in the process of writing a different ending to a very similar story. Land once used to collect weapons of war may transform into a place that instead collects sunshine.

Chemical Weapon Destruction:

While the destruction of the chemical weapon stockpile has yet to start in Pueblo, the U.S. government announced earlier this month that they have achieved the following milestones regarding the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty:

• • destroyed 67.6 percent of Category 1 chemical weapons, including 85.3 percent of chemical rockets, the destruction of 96.6 percent of nerve agent and destruction of all binary chemical weapons
• • destroyed all Category 3 chemical weapons
• • destroyed all former chemical weapons production facilities
• • completed destruction operations at three facilities
• • operating four destruction facilities at a cost of over $1 billion, with two additional sites (including the one in Pueblo) under construction
• • provided an estimated $20.5 billion for the destruction of chemical weapons in the U.S.

For more information, visit: cwc.gov.