Part 10: In which I skip merrily onwards toward nuclear radiation and return, disappointingly, without a second head
My economy class goes on the weirdest excursions, and this one happened to be to the Areva nuclear facility. I had been really looking forward to this because how often do you get to be around highly-dangerous-possibly-deadly stuff you barely understand? Probably pretty often, actually, but this time I knew I was walking into the dangerous and toxic unknown, and there's nothing more fun than that.
Actually that was a lie, the whole experience was pretty underwhelming. Most of our visit was spent going through radiation detectors, which unsurprisingly take a really long time. To be honest, I'm not really sure what we saw besides a lot of nuclear waste (heh) and some really sterile looking hallways that all looked the same. In general, nuclear power is fairly complex, and the fact that I was sleepy and everything was in French didn't help. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get to go into the gift shop, as I'd love to see what kind of souvenir merchandise a frickin' nuclear powerplant tries to hawk off to visitors.
We did, however, get this sweet (even I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic here) picture in front of George Besse II, the building we toured.
Haute couture at its finest.
Unfortunately you can't see the giant rusting metal canisters of nuclear waste to our left. They worried me mostly because it looked like the fields of waste canisters were all in some form of rusty decomposition, which, as you can imagine, is not one of the most reassuring sights one can see. Aside from that, I was saddened that we didn't see anything that appeared exceptionally fun (read: dangerous), though I'm sure there's always next time.