What is the ratio in energy produced by Urainium Vs Coal
eg if 50 kg of Urainium produces so much energy how much coal would it take to produce the same amount of energy ?
Depends on what process you use. If one was to use a fast breeder reactor, using 99.3% U238, which is highly dodgy and a process we haven't quite perfected (although I believe it's being done in Russia and I have an inkling there's one in Japan), then the energy output, in megajoules is incredible, that 50Kg would produce 1,200,000,000 megajoules of energy.
To give you an idea of how much energy that is, it's enough to keep refilling and boiling your average kettle for 2,000 years.
Using a lower energy nuclear reactor, such as a pebble bed reactor, you'd get 60 times less energy, but still, you're looking at a good 30 odd years of kettle action.
The best quality coal would give 1,600 MJ of energy, which would keep that kettle lighting for 6 days.
Of course, those are pure numbers, in fact, most power plants are essentially a big kettle, with a turbine driven by steam and fundamentally, there isn't that big a difference between a coal and a nuclear plant in how they generate power.
The process of converting the energy into power tends to be about 80% efficient in nuclear plants and 50% in the very best coal plants, which makes coal look even worse in comparison.
So before conversion, you'd need 37.5 million tons of coal to replicate it, but with power plant efficiencies coming into play, it's more like 60 million tons of coal.
Hope that helps.
