In fission reactors, one deals with neutrons having kinetic energies as high as
ID: 1918646 • Letter: I
Question
In fission reactors, one deals with neutrons having kinetic energies as high as 10 MeV. How much error is incurred in computing the speed of 10-MeV neutrons by using the classical expression rather than the relativistic expression for kinetic energy? For classical I used (1/2)mv^2 and got v=4.36244 x 10^7 m/s For relativistic, I used KE/(m_0*c^2)= (1/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)-1) and found v to be 4.3279011 x 10^7 m/s I found the error with the classical v - relativistic v divided by relativistic v and found the percentage error to be 0.798087%. Does my method and numbers sound correct and reasonable?Explanation / Answer
Method sounds correct. Though I got slightly different values.
vnewtonian=4.376x10^7 m/s
vrelativistic=4.342x10^7 m/s
%error = 0.783 %
Use mNc2=969.565 MeV (from wikipedia)