I went on a similar tour of one of Canada's CANDU Uranium/Deuterium plants in high school (The one in Pickering, Ontario http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/pick

I went on a similar tour of one of Canada's CANDU Uranium/Deuterium plants in high school (The one in Pickering, Ontario http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/pickering/index.html?dataPath=/photogallery/regions/toronto/gallery_532/xml/gallery_532.xml http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/pickering/index.html?data...) Especially freaky was the containment pool, glowing blue with cerenkov radiation, with nothing but a lead window between you and and an ugly death. They were many checkpoints to go through with detectors that check your shoes and hands for radioactive dust and I inadvertently set one off. I had not placed my hands on the sensors exactly right and the machine went off, scaring the sh*t out of me and everyone else. The most interesting thing about CANDU reactors is the vacuum building that can suck all the air out of the reactor buildings in the event of a deuteurium steam leak. Dampening rods are also held up by electromagnets that will drop and kill the reaction in the event of an electrical failure.