That’s true, but there is far more energy to gain by fusing hydrogen compared to carbon. I’m not sure how it compares to uranium though. I suspect it might be similar. (I mean, obviously in practice you wouldn’t / couldn’t actually get the energy from fusing carbon - but we can still compare hypothetically. … also, I’m sure we could get a clear answer by looking it up; but this is one of those things where thinking about it is probably more interesting than knowing the answer.)
Coal still has carbon in it. Carbon does have a lot of excess energy per nucleus. Just gotta turn it into iron.
That’s true, but there is far more energy to gain by fusing hydrogen compared to carbon. I’m not sure how it compares to uranium though. I suspect it might be similar. (I mean, obviously in practice you wouldn’t / couldn’t actually get the energy from fusing carbon - but we can still compare hypothetically. … also, I’m sure we could get a clear answer by looking it up; but this is one of those things where thinking about it is probably more interesting than knowing the answer.)
Carbon and uranium are pretty comparable. Look up binding energy per nucleon.