Moderator’s Canadian nuclear reactors use heavy Wafer moderators in which elastic collisions occur between the neutrons and deuterons of mass 2.0 u (see Example 8.11 in Section 8.4).
(a) What is the speed of a neutron, expressed as a fraction of its original speed, after a head-on, elastic collision with a deuteron that is initially at rest?
(b) What is its kinetic energy, expressed as a fraction of its original kinetic energy?
(c) How many such successive collisions will reduce the speed of a neutron to 1/59,000 of its original value?