I wonder if a water-filled jacket would be viable. When not in use it would be deflated and rolled up and stored. Between the bomb going off and the fallout arriving, you fetch it out, unroll it, wrap it around your inner sanctum and then fill it with water. If you have a generator and a swimming pool and an electric pump, you'd be self-contained.

The jacket would need to be a few feet thick and quite big, and very strong to support the water. It's harder to engineer than an above-ground swimming pool, but should be doable. The water could be drunk after the fallout has decayed away.

My own plan, such as it is, is to build a lean-to against an inner wall and then pile books against it. I seem to have a surfeit of books. I don't have a family, though.

Here's some quick background info and what I've done with it:

First off, move out of the cities. The farthur you are from the NuDet, the better off you will be. (Hint: Government agencies are moving their Admin and Supply records, and much of their HQ staffs to points that are 50 miles outside of Washington D.C. What does this tell you?)

Gamma Radiation is released at the time of the NuDet and then it is gone. The really bad radioactive particles will, for the most part, be airborne and stay airborne until they have become radioisotopes (dead) by the time they land on the ground.

The main radioactive materials that one will have to deal with are Alpha and Beta particles. Alpha particles can be stopped with tightly woven clothing and Beta particles can't penetrate unbroken skin.

My plan is to convert my 2 car garage into a shelter. I place my bookshelves against the garage doors. I've got 1" plywood cut for the garage door's exterior framing and for the 2 windows frames. I run air supply, CO2 removal, and antenna conduits through 1 of the window covers. The garage has a porta-potty in one corner, beds down 1 wall, workbench in 1 corner, communications and Intel files down 1 wall, cooking, food storage, and water storage down 1 wall, and a community area in the middle of 1 of the car bays.

I lay extra shielding (wood and cardboard, mostly)in the attic over the garage area.

In case of emergency, we have a place to shelter, eat, drink, poop, and entertain ourselves.

As I understand it, the idea is to get dense material between you and the environmental hazards. You want to make a secure room in the middle of the house. Here's my wild idea:

Where does it say that your dense material has to only be in the walls of that room?

You've got numerous walls from the entire house that you can modify. It might be cheaper or easier to modify numerous walls, so that you have varying thickness of materials at different places of the house. This would help avoid problems with extreme weight on one room's walls alone.

Those lead aprons are only used to block very small doses of radiation. They are trying to reduce lifetime accumulation.

I also understand that the radiation won't be just hanging around in the air, it will contaminate all the debris it moved. That debris will settle somewhere downwind. How long does that radioactivity last?

Sue

TOASTER KILLER.. i have not read thru all the replys to
your questions but i sort of recall seeing a photo in
National Geographic??..maybe..anyway a fellow who lived
in tornato alley dug himself a storm shelter under his
home..he had the same deal..no basement but in a smaller
home..from the looks of the photo he just took up the floor
boards and dug a simple "pit" room that his family could
get into..he survived while others were killed in the
storm that ripped his town apart..

Hello to all,,in answer to your question Susan,,,

Radiation decays into inert radioisotopes on a Bell Curve;

It decays very little in the first couple of hours and then starts decaying rapidly over the next 12-24 hours, and then decays at slug speed for the next 2-4 weeks. This is primarily Alpha and Beta particles which will land (fall) on you first.

Gamma particles also decay on the Bell Curve but, the lower end of the Curve lasts much longer (months, years???). Most of these particles will be dead BEFORE they hit the ground because they were thrown (mostly) up into the upper atmosphere!!!

Neutron particles run "Hot" for 3 days and then they have burned out and the area is radiation free (of course, almost everyone within 30 miles are dead, also). Neutron radiation has twice the penetration of Gamma radiation (per a Nurse's Manual I have read).


Now figure the "weathering effect" of rain on the fallout particles. It rains, water pools some, and then runs off to drainage ditches, creeks, streams, rivers, and on to the sea; carrying these particles with it. Each time it rains, your surroundings are cleaned a little more. If you have a copy of the Kearney Fallout Meter(KFM-see Nuclear War Survival Guide for instructions and template), then you can monitor the amounts of fallout during your stay in your shelter and you will know when it is safe to come out.

It will however, be a long time before you want to get caught outdoors in a rainstorm,as the rain brings high level fallout back to Earth (still somewhat hot) to be washed away (eventually).

This is why the prospect of growing a garden will be so challenging among the many challenges brought to you by a few fools both locally, nationally, and internationally.

P.S: A chest X-Ray is approx 1/32nd of a Rem dosage.
150 Rems=Radiation Sickness
250 Rems=Military Command Dosage (When you're allowed to come back into the shelter & decontaminate to enjoy a slow painful death in about 1-14 days depending on the individual)
450 Rems=DEATH (and that's final forever)

Pigs and Chickens are reported to withstand radiation quite well although not nearly as well as cockroaches

What great information. So basically just run to the mountains and wait to become a mutant werewolf!

lol

That is an idea...if I lived by myself things would already be in motion.

The wife and 3 kids hamper me a bit

radioactive decay is more about the isotope involved than anything else ... Cobalt 60 (Co60) has a much longer decay half-life than some other materials. Half-life being the time it takes for it energy level to reduce by one-half. For Co60 that is measure in years. For other things its measured in hours, days, months etc.
There are other long-lived isotopes that are resultant from a nuclear detonation .... and furthr ...if you are talking "dirty bomb" there is no "standard" makeup ...and whomever it was said it first ..is probably ritght. Dirty bombs are more about contamination than radiation. The bomb is dispersing hi level contaminants into the air to spread around for us to get all over ourselves and inhale or ingest so they can deposit inside us. Low level comtamination alpha and beta can be shielded by our sking ...but if you ingest it (breath or swallow) it irradiates our organs from the inside causing damage and cancers etc. But depending on the bomb makeup it can contain activated material isotopes with an extremely long half-life ....and one can't tell without some sophisticated instruments to anaylze them. So, what to do ? Defend all in the same basic manner...shield yourself. create decon and clean zones so that once you do venture out you make sure to decontaminate ...clothes and people before re-entry into the clean zones. This can be done by removing the outer layer of clothing or all the way to full-fledged showers. That's why you see Hazmat guys in suits ... the suits gets "crapped up" and are discarded or left "outside" as part of re-entry into the "clean zone" of your shelter. Either way for that you'll need at least the basic radiation monitoring instrumentation to make at least a token attempt to see that you are "clean". These instruments are available on the surplus market and represent technology that's 20 years old or more ...but they still do a good job and are reasonably priced.
If you are going to be in or want to venture back to a bomb area or one that got dusted with fallout you will need this technology if you are at all concerned about radiation hazards ...since you can't see it or smell it and once its affects are clearly visible its already too late for rudimentary corrective actions.
Some fun awareness training has been done for teaching about contamination and the spread of it, by dusting a particular area with a powder that will flouresce (spelling ?) under a black light....even once people are shown the right way to act they forget and when you turn on the black light you can see every place they touch anything after first touching the "contaminated" areas. It sounds scarier than it is ... staying "clean" is a lot easier than "getting clean" and being able to detect contamination isn't hard if you have the basic tools.