Green Tech

Katherine Sierra

(Credit: The World Bank)

SAN FRANCISCO--How will a shift in carbon reduction play out with the world's poor? This is an issue The World Bank is grappling with as it prepares for the international climate change summit in Copenhagen this December.

Katherine Sierra, the vice president for sustainable development at The World Bank, and Awais Khan, the director of KPMG's Clean Tech Venture Capital Practice, spoke on this topic Tuesday here at the Commonwealth Club.

Along with higher temperatures, climate change is causing rising sea levels, shifts in rain/snow patterns, and an increase in weather-related natural disasters. Although the impact is worldwide, people in developing countries get the brunt of it with severe risk to their agriculture, food, and water, Sierra said.

"We took a major step a couple years ago because we felt we weren't doing as good a job as we should have in integrating environment into our programs," said Sierra. "We actually merged our infrastructure practice with the environmental and social practices."

On top of being more vulnerable to climate change, countries in the developing world have a shortage of infrastructure. According to The World Bank, 1.6 billion people in the developing world still do not have access to electricity, and those who do may have only intermittent service.

"There are areas in Pakistan that have 12 to 14 hours of blackouts per day," said Khan. If the shortest way to fix that problem is through burning coal, he explains, that's what governments will do.

However, being the ninth-largest coal deposit in the world--with 186 billion tons of coal, Pakistan's "government is very favorable to using cleaner coal technologies," Khan said. "Sometimes we don't give enough credit to governments of developing countries."

The event fell on the heels of an article Sierra wrote for The San Francisco Examiner last week, where she explained what The World Bank, an international financial institution that loans money to developing countries, intends to do regarding climate change and the world's poor. Last year, The World Bank gave almost $7.6 billion for energy financing, a third of which went to renewable energy and energy efficiency. Projects included putting in rapid bus transport in five major cities in Mexico and working on smart grids in Turkey.

But another third of the $7.6 billion put forth was given to fund traditional fossil fuels. This is what skeptics generally point to when criticizing The World Bank's initiatives and intentions. The nonprofit Bank Information Center, for example, released a study in February on how The World Bank's energy financing is being felt by developing countries

The organization found that although The World Bank increased funding for renewable energy (by 11 percent), it dramatically increased funding for fossil fuels (by 102 percent) last year. "The bank's continued lending focus on fossil fuels commits many developing countries to fossil-fuel based energy for the next 20 to 40 years," said Heike Mainhardt-Gibbs, a consultant with the Bank Information Center.

The Bank Information Center points out that when developing countries begin to work on greenhouse gas emission reductions, it will be more difficult and expensive because of their extended use of fossil fuels.

The World Bank says the fossil fuels they are funding are increasingly clean coal technology and natural gas, which is the cleanest fossil fuel. "We want hospitals with refrigerators, schools with light bulbs," Sierra said during her talk, "if you look at any projections, they tell us under any circumstance we still need fossil fuels."

This will all be hashed out come December when representatives from over 180 countries meet in Copenhagen to work on a new treaty that addresses global warming. Within this international agreement, countries will look at what is doable and possible to lower greenhouse gas emissions while still trying to get energy to the world's poor.

The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: what do we do about coal?

Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and the world. But it's the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas.

Last week, the Obama administration declared, for the first time, that CO2 is a threat to human health and it plans to impose limits. But making coal safe will come at an astronomical cost.

After the economy, this could be the biggest debate in Washington. One of the most influential people in this is Jim Rogers. Coal has made Rogers and his company rich and that's why we were surprised to hear what this high-flying power baron has to say about what coal does to the environment.

Rogers wanted "60 Minutes" to see America's enormous dependency on coal, so he flew correspondent Scott Pelley out to see one of his 20 coal burning power plants.

"I remember the first time I took a helicopter and looked down on a power plant like this. I was 41 years old and I said, 'Oh my goodness, I'm responsible for that!'" Rogers told Pelley.

Rogers is the CEO of Duke Energy, the nation's third largest electric utility. His stacks pump 100 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which makes what comes out of Rogers' mouth so surprising.

"Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is going to happen," Pelley remarked.

"It's inevitable in my judgment," Rogers agreed.

"You're one of the biggest polluters in the world when it comes to carbon emissions," Pelley pointed out.

"We're one of the largest emitters. And it tells you how daunting the challenge is that we have in front of us," Rogers replied.

"You know, there are a lot of people many of them in your industry may who you probably know who say that global warming is not a big problem," Pelley said.

"It's my judgment it is a problem," Rogers said. "We need to go to work on it now. And it's critical that we start to act in this country."

Acknowledging a problem
Like a reformed tobacco executive, Rogers says we can't survive the emissions his industry creates. He showed "60 Minutes" what he means at a North Carolina power station that can light up one and a half million homes.

Rogers told Pelley that particular plant burns roughly 19,000 tons of coal. "That's two train loads. And each train has about 100 cars," he explained.

The fact is, America runs on coal and here's one of the reasons why: the Powder River Basin that stretches across Wyoming and Montana may be the largest coal reserve on Earth. We've got 200 years worth of reserves--cheap, and right under our feet. No wonder coal generates half of our electricity.

But here's the brutal part: coal is twice as dirty as natural gas and puts more carbon dioxide in the air than all of our cars and trucks. In short, the U.S. is caught between a rock and a hot place.

"I notice all of this coming out of the stacks. What is that?" Pelley asked.

"That's good news," Rogers said. "When you see a plume comin' out of a stack of a power plant, that's vapor. And it basically says that the emissions have been cleaned."

The power industry spent billions in the 1990s cleaning up much of the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. But those pollutants are mere drops in a stream of carbon dioxide. Rogers says getting rid of the carbon will require a new federal law to limit emissions and a new technology to clean up coal. At the same time, he says, Duke will transition to more wind, solar, and nuclear power.

"Our goal line is substantially to reduce our carbon footprint, to de-carbonize our business, by 2050," he explained.

"Four decades? That's a long time," Pelley remarked.

"Well, it took a hundred years to get to where we are. And we can't do this overnight," Rogers said.

Too late?
But Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientists, says 2050 is too late.

"We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren, and the unborn," he said.

Hansen is credited with some of the earliest and most accurate projections of climate change. He thinks Roger's plan leaves the Earth in the oven decades too long.

"We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters," Hansen told Pelley.

"Are you saying we can't build any new coal fired power plants in this country?" Pelley asked.

"Absolutely, not only in this country, but in the world. This is not yet understood. We are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we have to preserve the climate like the one that has existed the last several thousand years," Hansen said.

You know, Jim Rogers will hasten to tell you he does share your sense of urgency," Pelley remarked.

"Well, his plan doesn't match that," Hansen replied.

In fact, right now Rogers is building two new coal plants. "You're talking a great game, but you're building coal-fired power plants," Pelley pointed out.

"I am following through on what is job one for me, making sure my customers have affordable, reliable, clean electricity," Rogers said.

Asked what would happen if we abandoned coal at this point, Rogers said, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."

To read the entire "60 Minutes" segment, click here.

LAGUNA, NIGUEL, Calif.--What do you get when you put the CEO of a coal-dependent utility on stage with two environmental advocates to discuss whether coal can be clean? A surprisingly civil discussion with more than just straight "pro" and "con" positions.

The CEO of American Electric Power, Michael Morris, spoke on the same panel with Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, and David Hawkins, the director of climate programs at the Environmental Defense Council on Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference here.

AEP is the second-largest electricity generator in the U.S. and gets 73 percent of its power from coal. The company is now in the process of building a new coal-fired power plant in Arkansas and investing in a demonstration facility to store carbon dioxide from burning coal underground.

Carbon capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is isolated and pumped underground, is considered vital technology to making coal less polluting. Coal is the source of about half the electricity in the U.S. and about 70 percent around the world. At the same time, underground storage of coal--a major contributor to carbon emissions--is opposed because it is not proven and because coal causes many environmental hazards.

AEP's Morris believes that global warming from the build up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere needs to be addressed through carbon regulations. But to think that coal will stay in the ground in naive in his view.

"It's a prism of answers with energy efficiency and renewable energy. But you're kidding yourself if you think you are taking coal off the board," he said.

The technology, being tested in AEP's demonstration facility, is not fully operational and needs to become more efficient. The company is seeking Department of Energy loans to build a larger facility. Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a "big believer," Morris said.

A climate change law that restricts carbon dioxide emissions is likely to come out in the next year, said Morris, who made clear he intends to meet emissions limits in large part with underground carbon storage.

He estimated that building carbon, capture and storage equipment on coal plants pushes the price of electricity up from three to four cents a kilowatt-hour to five to six cents.

To Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network, pursuing carbon, capture, and storage technology diverts valuable resources from cleaner sources of energy while making the climate change problem worse.

"The reality is there is no such thing as clean coal. There is not a single commercial plant in the U.S. that captures carbon emissions and stores them underground," he said. "Within the next 10 or 15 years, we could find a way, technologically speaking (to do it). I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying we shouldn't try."

Brune said the technology is not yet safe or economical. Coal also has several other bad pollutants, such as mercury, and the source of many environmental and health problems.

"Where does coal come from? It still comes from mountaintop removal...It still pollutes billions of gallons of water a year," he said.

By contrast, the NRDC supports investments for the development of underground storage of carbon dioxide from coal, said Hawkins. The reasoning has more to do with politics than the environment, though.

To pass a climate change law that sets the U.S. on a path of reducing carbon emissions in the coming decades, members of Congress from coal-dependent states need to be convinced, he said.

"We have two ways to do things. We can change the Congress or we can change the Congress' mind. We don't have time to change the Congress," Hawkins said.

The NRDC, like other environmental groups, is also fighting to address other environmental problems from coal, which Hawkins called "fixable problems."

The other reason to forge ahead with research in underground carbon storage is for the U.S. to take leadership in climate change to other countries, notably coal-dependent India and China.

"The way to get China and India to take this seriously is for the United States to treat this seriously," Hawkins said.

Coal: a difficult conversation. From left: Fotune's Adam Lashinsky, AEP's Michael Morris, Rainforest Action Network's Michael Brune, and NRDC's David Hawkins.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

SOMERSET, Mass.--When it comes to covering green technologies, the color can sometimes be black as coal.

On Monday I drove to Southern Massachusetts to visit GreatPoint Energy's $37 million Mayflower Clean Energy Center, a demonstration plant for converting coal to natural gas. Built down the road from the state's largest coal plant at the mouth of the Taunton River, the plant started producing natural gas last month and is now gathering data to optimize the operation.

(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)

As a technology reporter, it's fascinating to see the energy industry's version of "hardware"--a 200-foot-high reactor, silos holding thousands of pounds of feedstock, and all manner of pipes of valves. I also got to wear a hardhat.

Most people associate green tech with renewable energy--sun, wind, biomass, geothermal. In reality, a lot of energy technology is aimed at making conventional fuels cleaner, which is exactly GreatPoint Energy's mission: to convert dirty coal into cleaner-burning natural gas and to bury carbon dioxide emissions underground.

From a business perspective, GreatPoint Energy is one of many green-tech start-ups taking those first steps from labs to commercialization--a precarious transition that few have been able to make. The project itself is a test case for some potentially significant energy technologies--gasification and underground storage of carbon dioxide.

Gasification, which appears to be undergoing a quiet resurgence in energy, is being used to turn many different feedstocks--coal, biomass, and even municipal trash--into a gas that can later be burned for heat or electricity. Whether gasification technologies qualify for "clean energy" government incentives is still unclear, but backers say that it's a cleaner process than burning.

Successful storage of carbon dioxide, meanwhile, is one of the keys to making coal less polluting. The idea of so-called clean coal is to make electricity with coal, while removing pollutants and storing carbon dioxide underground at a power generation plant.

Chemistry class
GreatPoint Energy's hydromethanization process treats coal with steam, mixes it with a catalyst, and then puts that mixture into a gasifier--essentially a 200-foot-tall metal tube under high heat and pressure.

Inside the gasifier, the feedstock breaks down into different gases and the solid material collects at the bottom. GreatPoint Energy engineers are tuning the process to generate and separate methane, the primary component of natural gas, and carbon dioxide.

The natural gas can be shipped in existing pipelines and used for heating or to make electricity.

What about the carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas? GreatPoint Energy's plans call for building plants in areas, such as Wyoming, where there are both coal and existing oil and gas wells. Injecting CO2 into these wells lets drillers extract more from wells, while keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, company executives envision using underground geological formations like salt caverns to store the CO2.

Using existing scrubbing equipment, GreatPoint can remove other pollutants, including mercury, nitrogen, and sulfur. An important facet to its test facility is finding methods for recuperating the catalyst and those pollutants, which can be sold for other uses such as ammonia fertilizer.

Steel in the ground: the feedstock-handling equipment at GreatPoint Energy's coal-to-natural gas demo plant.

(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)

The company's analysis found that it can produce natural gas with a lower carbon footprint than extracting natural gas from the ground, assuming a carbon storage site can be found. Its financial target is making gas at between $4 and $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), which is in the range of today's prices but lower than natural gas prices before the global recession hit.

At the facility on a piece of land called Brayton Point, the company plans to spend the next several months fine-tuning the process to produce the desired gases and to deal with different qualities of coal, which vary greatly.

Next stop: China
As a company, GreatPoint Energy has gotten a fair amount of attention. It attracted renowned venture capital company Kleiner Perkins as one of its first investors, and a $115 million investment from a collection of energy corporation companies was the largest green-tech investment in 2007.

Photos: Inside one company's quest to clean coal

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick played a key role in getting its demonstration facility sited and quickly approved. It took just 18 months to build and get its plant online.

Its next project is to open a larger pilot facility in China at a coal-fired power plant with Datang Huanyin Electric Power, one of the biggest polluters on the planet. "If we can show (Datang) that they can make more money being clean rather than dirty, then we can make a real impact," says GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman.

These facilities aren't cheap: the pilot plant in China will cost between $100 million and $200 million, financed primarily by Datang. A full-scale operation would cost $1 billion to build, a reminder of how vital it is for start-ups to get access to large amounts of capital, either through equity partnerships with large corporations or government loans.

Back home in Massachusetts, the company is seeking to build expertise in the core technologies behind its process--carbon capture, gasification, and mineralization, through a partnership with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said Chief Financial Officer Daniel Goldman.

"The concept is to create a 'green line,' a research and development corridor down here," Goldman said. "There's been a lot of research in these fields but very little commercialization."

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is optimistic about the potential of wind power to help wean the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil.

(Credit: CNET)

"The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility," he said. "It is not technology that is pie-in-the-sky; it is here and now," Salazar said, according to an AP report, at a meeting in Atlantic City, N.J., Monday.

Salazar is hosting four regional public meetings in April to discuss the future of offshore energy development on the nation's Outer Continental Shelf on the East Coast.

At the Atlantic City forum, he presented (PDF) estimates from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that said wind has a gross resource of 463 gigawatts of power in the mid-Atlantic area alone. The current U.S. total production of electricity from coal is 366 gigawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration.

However, a large portion of the potential wind power is located out in deep waters. The laboratory assumes that about 40 percent of wind potential could actually be developed, totaling 185 gigawatts, or enough to power about 53.3 million average U.S. homes.

European countries, including Denmark and the U.K., have installed offshore wind parks. But so far not one offshore wind park has been built in the United States. Cape Wind in the Nantucket Sound hopes to be the first, but it is still fighting for approval.

A member of the American Coal Council, for example, told the Associated Press he thinks Salazar is too optimistic with his offshore wind estimates, and questions what will happen on days the wind is not strong enough.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar

(Credit: U.S. Department of the Interior)

The offshore energy development on the Outer Continental Shelf could also include controversial offshore oil drilling, a popular topic last year when gas prices hovered around $4 per gallon. A moratorium on offshore oil drilling has expired and Salazar also presented a potential for new energy there.

After more than 50 years of exploration and development, 70 percent of total resources are yet to be discovered, he estimates. More than half of this potential exists in areas of the Outer Continental Shelf outside the central and western Gulf of Mexico.

But the seismic data, upon which these estimates are based, is often more than 25 years old, and Salazar said in a press release that department scientists discovered huge information gaps about the location and extent of offshore oil and gas resources.

President Barack Obama and Congress must now decide whether to allow drilling off the East Coast.

Salazar continued his tour with a similar forum Wednesday in New Orleans, where oil and gas industry representatives expressed concern about the Obama Administration promotion of renewables. They claim that green energy cannot possibly provide all U.S. energy needs in the coming years--if ever. Offshore oil drilling is a must, they maintain.

"All areas of the Outer Continental Shelf should be open without delay for oil and natural gas development," Sara Banaszak, senior economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said in a press statement.

If your mission is to make coal less polluting, China is a good place to start.

GreatPoint Energy, a start-up with technology to convert coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, expects to open a demonstration plant in China in three years.

The plant would cost between $100 million and $200 million and be located at a coal-fired power plant operated by Datang Huanyin Electric Power. Most of the financing for the plant will come from Datang, one of the biggest single polluters on the planet, according to GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman.

GreatPoint Energy's pilot facility in Somerset, Mass.

(Credit: GreatPoint Energy)

Although GreatPoint Energy's business is focused on fossil fuels, the company was founded by environmentalists intent on tackling climate change.

In its demonstration plant in China, GreatPoint's technology will convert 1,500 tons of coal a day into natural gas, according to Perlman.

China is rapidly constructing more domestically supplied coal plants to meet swelling electricity demand, contributing to air pollution problems and rapid growth in the country's carbon emissions.

"If we can show (Datang) that they can make more money being clean rather than dirty, then we can make a real impact," says Perlman.

GreatPoint's hydromethanization process, being used in pilot facilities in Massachusetts and Illinois, passes coal or other carbon-heavy feedstock through a chute where it is treated with a metal catalyst and steam.

The material is then gasified in a chamber, which creates carbon dioxide and methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. The methane is then cleaned and the catalyst recuperated for use again. The process can work with petroleum coke, a byproduct of oil extraction from tar sands, or plant biomass.

The end product--natural gas--is a lot cleaner to burn than coal and can be transported through existing pipelines. Other chemicals in the coal, including nitrogen and sulfur, can be separated and sold for industrial use, according to Perlman.

But GreatPoint Energy's process also creates carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. To keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the company plans to build its plants in places where it can be pumped underground to get more oil out of existing wells, a technique already done in the oil and gas industry.

Overall, GreatPoint's process can produce natural gas at between $4 and $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), which is in the range of today's prices but a lot lower than natural gas prices before the global recession hit.

Cleaner fossil fuels?
Many entrepreneurs interested in green technologies have gravitated toward solar power, which still garners the most venture capital compared to other segments, or IT-related fields like smart-grid tech.

But Perlman argues that renewable energy sources, which represent less than 3 percent of power generation in the U.S., cannot be ramped up fast enough to make a significant impact on cleaning up power generation.

"The problem with renewables is that realistically they may not get us to where we need to go. Coal has to realistically be in the mix and realistically be a big part of the mix," he said at last month's AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference, where GreatPoint Energy was picked as the top green business.

The company is pursuing other coal plants in China and the U.S. Following its demonstration facility with Datang, it hopes to build a full-scale plant, which would cost $1 billion, Perlman said.

"China is tremendously short on natural gas. They are going to have to use more natural gas if they are going to clean the environment and address their air problems," he said.

GreatPoint Energy CEO Andrew Perlman at GoingGreen East conference in Boston.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

In a rare independent study of China's energy sector, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the problem with China's coal power generation is not that its power plants lack cleaner technology.

The emissions are definitely higher than they could be, the report found, but the culprit is usually low-quality coal rather than low-tech plants. As an MIT statement explains:

Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade anthracite comes mostly from China's northwest and must travel long distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost.

The researchers gathered their own data instead of relying on Chinese government statistics, which can be unreliable. This may not sound like a big deal, but even large international organizations often, or even primarily, depend on government numbers.

"The kinds of technology currently being adopted in China are not cheap," lead researcher Edward S. Steinfeld said in the statement. "They're not buying junk, and in some cases, the plants are employing state-of-the-art technology."

There could be room for improvement in technology, however. A pilot power plant capable of using carbon-capture technology opened in China in July, and widespread efforts on energy continue. But this MIT report underlines the challenge of cleaning up power generation when the fuel is dirtier than usual.

The full report is available in PDF.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The chief executive of Duke Energy, James Rogers, is an unlikely advocate for policies to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. But the man who is building two new coal power plants is just that.

Rogers delivered a keynote speech at the MIT Energy Conference here on Saturday where he called for policies and technologies to bridge the fossil fuel-based energy industry of today with low-carbon alternatives.

Duke Energy CEO James Rogers at the MIT Energy Conference.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

Rogers heads a company that generates 90 percent of its electricity from burning coal or nuclear power to serve its 4 million customers. So it's not surprising that he says that "coal is not a four-letter word."

But even with his company's marriage to fossil fuels, the potential influence of Duke Energy and its like over the future of the energy industry is undeniable: Duke's capital budget to invest in technology and infrastructure is $5 billion this year.

Meanwhile, the total amount of venture capital that went into clean tech start-ups last year was in the range of $3 billion to $4 billion.

Rogers is one of several industry CEOs calling for regulations that put a price on polluting carbon dioxide and Duke Energy is a member of U.S. CAP (United States Climate Action Partnership), a consortium of large corporations trying to influence policy.

Technology research should be funded now without waiting for carbon regulations, which he expects to come into force in 2009 and 2010 followed by a transition period.

"A vision of a low-carbon world is a hallucination without technology," Rogers said. He said the U.S. federal government is funding research and development in energy at 50 percent of the level it was in the 1970s.

Energy efficiency technology, such as smart grids, should be adopted immediately. But policy makers need to create the same incentives for energy efficiency as they are for renewable energy, like wind and solar, he argued.

He called for "decarbonizing" the electricity power grid. Once plug-in hybrid vehicles come online, a cleaner power system will effectively address cleaning the transportation sector as well, he said.

"I think the technology can do it. We just need to spend the money," he said, complaining about a lack of focus on climate change among policy makers. "Where the hell is the sense of mission? The mission is solving climate change."

At the same time, Rogers cautioned against policies that will dramatically raise the price of electricity for consumers.

In particular, he said that certain states are at a disadvantage to one policy proposal that is the equivalent to a carbon tax because they generate power from coal, which is a dirtier form of power generation than natural gas or nuclear.

"If you have a consumer revolt, one, it will never get passed and secondly, even it does, it gets repealed. So it's very important for us to get that right...

(Policy) has got to be affordable, it's got to be a transition, it has got to make sense, and we need a political consensus to go forward. We can't afford to get started and stop. And we can't delay. We need to get started even faster," he said.

Rogers also called for a fundamental change to utility regulation that does not tie the company's revenues to the amount of power it sells.

Instead, the utilities that can run their power networks most efficiently through software should be the most successful financially, he said.

"I want to change my model so that I create value not by building power plants. I create value by optimizing those networks," Rogers said.

The U.S. does not recycle nuclear waste from power plants because it could be used for weapons, but that might change.

Pete Domenici, the Republican Senator from New Mexico, said the country should start to examine the benefits of recycling fuel, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

France and most other nuclear energy-producing countries recycle fuel. Doing so cuts down the amount of fuel that needs to be mined, as well as the amount of nuclear waste that needs to get buried. Recycling, however, leads to byproducts that can be used to build bombs.

Domenici also said he wants to introduce legislation that would create more nuclear depositories, possibly in New Mexico. The Department of Energy has invested billions of dollars over several years in trying to build a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The project, however, faces strong opposition.

No nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. in decades, but global warming, as well as higher prices for coal and natural gas, have revived the industry. An estimated 31 applications for building new nuclear plants in the United States are expected to be filed in the next few years. The applications, though, will likely draw strong opposition.

A few start-ups are also tinkering with nuclear fusion, which produces much less waste than nuclear fission, the basis of nuclear plants today. (Nuclear plants basically create heat, which is used to create steam to crank a turbine.)