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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Key term: *Energy density*. It’s the amount of energy per unit mass that you can get out of a given fuel.
The energy density of fuel-grade uranium undergoing fission is several orders of magnitude greater than a similar mass of coal, because nuclear fission gives off VASTLY more energy per reaction than regular old oxidative combustion (burning) of coal (or any other hydrocarbon for that matter).
>One uranium fuel pellet creates as much energy as one ton of coal, 149 gallons of oil or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.
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>-[https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-fuel](https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-fuel)
If that’s tl;dr – **You can boil a f- of a lot more water with a few grams of uranium fuel undergoing fission than you can with a literal TON of coal. Because nuclear fission.**
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