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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In short, nuclear fuel burns hotter for longer than coal can. This allows for higher pressure steam, which means faster turning turbines.
>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?
Boiling water to spin a turbine isn’t a magic energy creation process. Energy cannot be created, it’s just moved around from one state into another. Steam turbines are a way of transforming heat energy into electric energy. For a coal power plant that heat energy comes from the chemical energy stored in the bonds of the coal. For a nuclear power plant the heat energy comes from the nuclear bonds within the fissile material. The latter is orders of magnitude stronger than the former. Nuclear power plants **boil more water** per kg of fuel.
For a similar reason that coal gives more energy than wood.
It’s very simplified, but essentially it’s all to do with energy density. One kilo of coal has more stored energy than a kilo of wood, and a kilo of uranium has more energy density than coal.
Turning a turbine by hand wouldn’t create much energy because you aren’t putting much energy *into* the system to begin with.
Using a big bonfire to boil water to turn a turbine would create a bit more energy because it’s turning the turbine more quickly. The problem is that you’d need a *gigantic* fire to get the amount of energy you need to do anything at a large scale, and you’d have to keep feeding it constantly.
Nuclear power turns the turbine *really* quickly, and uses a small fuel source that “burns” for a really really long time.
Because one kilo of nuclear fuel produces thousands of times more heat than one kilo of coal. Therefore a coal power plant would need to burn thousands of times more fuel than a nuclear power plant to produce the same amount of power. And that’s basically what they do, a nuclear power plant and a coal power plant overall produce comparable amounts of power. It’s just that a nuclear power plant does that with relatively little actual nuclear fuel which only has to be replaced roughly once a year. While coal power plants burn through massive amounts of coal which has to be fed into the furnace more or less constantly, usually with a conveyor belt from a huge heap of coal nearby, and that heap has to be replenished frequently by trainloads of coal.
In a coal or natural gas power plant you are extracting the energy from the chemical bonds holding the carbon and hydrogen atoms together by burning them.
In a nuclear power plant you are extracting the energy from the nuclear bonds holding the protons and neutrons of uranium atoms together by letting neutrons smash into the atoms.
There is rediculiously more energy in nuclear bonds than chemical bonds.
because nuclear fuel “burns” much stronger and for much longer and with basically no harmful byproducts that cannot be contained.
per unit of fuel ,in output there is no competing with nuclear atm.
They don’t produce much more energy per power plant. If you compare big nuclear reactors and big coal power plants they produce about the same amount of electricity.
Nuclear power plants produce far more energy *per fuel mass*, because splitting the nuclei of atoms releases far more energy than chemical reactions (a few million times more): You need several tonnes of coal to match the energy a single gram of uranium can release.
Nuclear power plants tend to be more complex: You need more precautions handling the fuel, the reactor and so on, no matter how large or small the reactor is. That means making a small nuclear power plant is less attractive, while making a smaller coal power plant can make sense in some places.
It’s very similar to asking why lettuce contains less energy per kg than snickers.
“How much energy can you put into a certain space/weight”
For the sake of simplicity, lets say a 1GW power plant produce 1GW regardless of the method
the difference being that to produce that amount you will need a lot of coal in a coal plsnt but a lot less Uranium in a nuclear plant because Uranium is far energy denser
similar like current batteries and gasoline, gasoline is great because it contain a lot of energy for its weight and volume while batteries energy density is far lower, with modern batteries we have reached a level that is usable for what we want but ideally we would want even denser energy batteries if we wanted to use them on something like aircraft
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