I didn't even try to post the cool pic I had of the fusion reactor after I lost my first attempt at this discussion to the TECHNICAL FAILURE bug and realized I'd forgotten to copy the text before hitting submit. YIKES! Half hour down the tubes. That bug drives me nuts! Anyway here's the pic (couldn't just add it on edit either) *sigh*

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the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), a large fusion device operated at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) during the 1980s and 1990s. The inside of TFTR was shaped like a donut (a torus). Moving in a circular path around the center of the torus, the plasma reached temperatures of more than 500 million degrees, well beyond the 100 million needed for practical fusion. Ideally, commercial fusion reactors will operate continuously, but TFTR was designed to operate only in bursts. In one of these bursts, its power output exceeded 10 million watts, enough to power more than 3,000 homes.

Science was always my worst subject, so I won't pretend that I understood more than about half of that. It certainly looks awesome, and I'm all for doing something with all the garbage we create, and to find alternate forms of energy, especially if they are safer.

I think I need the kindergartener's explanation.

I'll see what I can come up with lol.

And to clarify safer. They're safer than a fission reactor (the reactor in a typical nuclear power plant today) and a lot cleaner than coal fired plants (which could be considered safer I guess). Unlike fission reactors, there's no danger of a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island-like meltdown with fusion reactors. The reaction simply stops if there is a breach.

Is our Candu reactor a fission reactor?

There is a nuclear power plant between Kingston and Toronto,I can't remember the name right now, I think it's Darlington, and another one just on the outskirts of Toronto, in Pickering, called and I better remember this, the Pickering Power Plant, very close to where two of my brothers live. Can you tell me what kinds of things might happen if something went wrong at one of these?

I certainly know about Chernobyl, and Three-Mile Island but they were a long time ago, and my brain is kinda fuzzy on the details, I think there were things like miscarriages, cancers, lots of other health problems. Did I get any of that right?

From 1965 to 1968 we lived in Monroe, Michigan. There is a nuclear reactor there. My parents were talking one day, a couple of years ago, about how 3 of their 4 children have health problems, especially ones that are considered "for now anyway" to be autoimmune type illnesses. While they are both basically healthy, they both have a few allergies, mom has high blood pressure, and dad has osteopenia (and now this cancer scare but that's new). That how there seems to have been less illness, than my brothers and I have, in their parents' and prior generations. My mom's family has diabetes big time, her dad and a sister died of diabetic complications, all of her siblings, and most of her cousins have it, and now me, and one of my brothers , but that's about it. My dad's osteoporosis, in my grandmother, and heart condition ,(so I know I really have to watch out for heart and stroke) in my grandfather. Further back they say they didn't notice anything.

All of a sudden, and certainly out of the blue to me, she turns to my dad and says, I wonder if it has anything to do with the incident that happened at the nuclear power plant, in Monroe? Obviously, the next word out of my mouth was WHAT? My dad explained it to me, but IT WAS SCIENCE. I think basically what he said was that there is a piston like thing that is supposed to move up and down, and that it didn't, it was sorta fused in place, it hadn't worked since day one, so it didn't work the whole time, I think they said the whole time, we lived there. Apparently, nobody, other than the plant and the government (I think that's all they said) knew about it for years, and that it came out years later, many years after we moved here. My dad sometimes goes into my neuropsychiatrist's and pain specialist's office with me, so that he can help me remember, or understand what I have been told. At my next appointments, he came in with me and I asked could it have caused the illnesses, they both said maybe, but we will probably never know. Those kind of problems?

Oh dare you are. Okay I left the joke over in Tango--they don't mind so you can read at leisure. It is not one of my best, but it was funny to me 'cause I was there and saw the expression on her face when I was saying those bizarre things. Now that I'm here, gator I know this is old hat to you but several years ago there was a flurry of activity at the U of H. when a Chinese/American professor(name escapes me)claimed to be hot on the trail(forgive the pun)of Cold Fusion. He got tons of bucks funding his research and suddenly noone--at least--not I ever heard any more. Do you know ? And if so--if there is ANY possibility that such room temp fusion can be accomplished that would answer a lot of questions regarding limitless--cheap and safe supplies. Jus axin.

Whew gayle and wmans. Better get my thinkin hat on here and another Pepsi.

Ok. Yes gayle, the Candu plant uses a fission type reactor. Candu is short for CANada Deuterium Uranium which is a reactor that uses Uranium as a fuel and heavy water (water with the heavier Deuterium isotope of Hydrogen instead of plain old Hydrogen) to absorb excess neutrons (free neutrons are what split or fission the uranium atoms) and moderate the reaction as well as to cool the core. It's not exactly the same type reactor that Three Mile Island and Chernobyl used but they're all fission type reactors. Three Mile Island 2 and I think Chernobyl are pressurized water reactors that use cadmium rods to absorb neutrons and thus moderate the reaction and regular pressurized water to cool the core. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/three/sfeature/tmihow.html

The meltdown at TMI-2 didn't actually have much of an effect healthwise on the community because it had an adequate containment housing that was never breached. Small amounts of radiation were released but not enough to do much harm. The reactor was a total loss and was covered under concrete but TMI-1 is still operating and has made many upgrades to prevent a reoccurance. Chernobyl was a complete disaster and did kill many people and heavily contaminated the surrounding countryside with fallout (that will last for thousands of years) because the Russians didn't use containment housings. When the fuel rods overheated and melted down through the reactor core they eventually encountered the cooling water and created a gigantic steam explosion releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. Adequate containment would have prevented this tragedy.

As to whether an event at Candu could have caused your families health problems, I doubt it given the particular problems you describe. The long term illnesses associated with exposure to that type of radiation tend more to bone cancers, leukemia (destoys the bone marrow) and thyroid problems and cancers because Iodine 131 is a really nasty little byproduct of Uranium decay. It's an alpha emitter (those are the most dangerous if somehow ingested even in very small quantities) and goes straight for the thyroid. I'm not sure we really know what causes most of the auto immune type diseases so that's probably why the docs say maybe. Heart disease and diabetes have nothing to do with radiation poisoning of this type as far as I know. I know it's nothing you could ever prove if that's what you were thinking.

I wouldn't worry too much about Candu. It's a state-of-the-art facility and has more than adequate containment. Supposed to be able to withstand an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter scale in fact.

You're probably wondering how I know this kind of stuff lol. I did a 2 year program in Radiation Protection Physics specifically geared toward working in nuclear power plants. I stopped with 61 of 67 credit hours toward the degree when TMI went down. We had a choice, go work the TMI meltdown (which I did NOT want to do) or switch programs because the whole program shut down and everyone including the instructors went to TMI. My friend Susan is still working there today. I used some of the credits later when I went back to school for the geology degree I have now but most didn't transfer. So now I finally got to use that knowledge!

Oh and another note:

I didn't intend to suggest that our government isn't doing anything with this. The DOE has an ongoing project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at Sandia that I know of and probably more I don't know of. I'd just like to see more come out concerning commercialization of the technology here. Japan is using it after all.

http://www.energy.gov/energysources/index.htm