If nuclear power plants boil water to turn a turbine to make energy then why do they make more energy than a coal power plant that does the same?
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Hydroelectric power plant utilize gravitational potential energy to generate power.
Coal/Natural Gas plants utilize chemical potential energy to generate power. The chemical energy is stored in the binding energy of molecules due to the electro-magnetic force.
Nuclear plants make use of the binding energy of atomic nucleons which are based on the nuclear strong force.
In general, the stronger the force, the more energy you can extract per weight of fuel. The relative strength of the forces are:
Stong Force = 100 * Electro-magnetic force = 10^38 gravitational force.
While you can’t use these numbers without some modification, they show you the qualitatively the amount of fuel required to generate the same amount of energy.
Hydroelectric requires enormous amount of water (the “fuel) falling a good distance to generate the energy. Dams are huge!
Coal and gas fired plants require significantly smaller quantities of fuel to produce their energy.
Nuclear plants require very little actual fuel to generate their energy. Not easy or cheap to make that fuel however.
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