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Coal Reserves
The amount of coal worldwide is approximately 1 trillion metric tons while more still left over in unknown areas. United States currently holds the majority of coal and bituminous reserves while Russia comes in second and China follows behind in third. The United States currently holds around 400 years of coal in now established reserves, which are currently in use. True totals of coal reserves can conceivably be higher if using accessible mining methods and could even be higher if new methods are presented. Canada is also a contender in this list but it is left unexploited in the region east of the Alberta oil sands deposits. Coal, because of it’s comparatively low cost comes out to be the most likely to fuel the world’s energy needs. Problems do appear from coal consumption though, from its high carbon content. Solutions to this problem can be solved from removing carbon before the burning of it but because of how carbon contributes to most of the thermal energy from coal, it would be useless in doing so. There has been a lack of natural gas as of lately; this could result in the United States to look for alternative sources of fuel besides from coal.

Biomass and Ethanol Reserves
Biomass is collected from large volumes of plant origin, which include corn or wood waste. Biomass does not just include these two substances though; it can range from leftover grass to surplus pulp. John R. Wilson and Griffin Burgh say although the needed machinery is not currently available but that a variation of feedstock are readily available for use in producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass. They continue saying that even more materials are being considered such as agricultural waste, forest residue, and municipal solid waste if of dependable makeup and worth, and energy crops such as fast-growing poplar. The big issue from ethanol conversion comes from the cost issue of the selection of such feedstock, as well as environmental issues. An example of such feedstock include forest thinning’s. The problem of forest thinning’s do not come in large amounts but can be collected at a low cost, the set back is that collection costs rises as the amount increases.

Nuclear Power
Another type of solid fuel includes nuclear power, which uses uranium ore. The use of fossil fuels has been declining throughout the decades; this brings the issue of creating a source that has zero-carbon. An option for this source that has zero-carbon includes nuclear power. Nature does not provide nuclear power from its origin form so it is extracted from uranium ore. A rock that has a content of more than 0.1% is considered to be workable. A problem with mining uranium ore is that it creates large amounts of waste that contains a lot of radioactive residues and additionally some non-toxic substances. Another problem with using uranium ore is that the earth only has a limited amount of it and if the earth were to switch entirely onto nuclear power, the source would be depleted in a relatively short amount of time. France currently uses nuclear power for the majority of their electricity supply, while countries like Australia, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal does not use any nuclear power at all.

Solid Fuel: Uranium235
Uranium235 (235 U) is a solid fuel used in the production of energy. Fission of the Uranium235 is caused by bombarding it with neutrons. In doing so the fission proses creates new free neutrons that will continue the fission proses. The proses causes the mass of the uranium atom to be reduced from its original size. The reduction in size is converted to energy in the form of heat. The heat produced creates steam that is used to in steam turbines to create electricity.

Waste
Spent uranium fuel rods are reprocessed after use to recover fissile materials for use in nuclear power plants. This reprocessing gains 25% to 30% more energy from the original fuel. Reprocessing also reduces the amount of spent fuel to be disposed of too about on fifth. The reprocessed fuels radioactivity has a decay rate that falls much faster than that of the non-reprocessed fuel.

Resources
Uranium is a common element found in the earth’s crust in an ore body, a mineralization containing uranium that is easy to be extracted from. Uranium can also be found in granites and the ocean but is less cost effective to extract. At current cost and usage in civil reactors the worlds known uranium reserves will last 80 years. The majority of the world’s uranium supply can be found in Australia with 30%.