I had previously been thinking that DIY shelter might be worth exploring, because it’s pretty simple, just a matter of how much mass there is between you and the radiation, and what that mass is made of. So just getting hunks of wood or metal should do the trick. I guess not though. I shouldn’t be surprised, this stuff is never as easy as it seems.
Don’t let me hurt your curiosity—DIY shelters are absolutely worth learning about, and disaster preparedness is synergistic. There’s a reason the CDC ran that “zombie apocalypse preparedness” campaign back in 2011 -- preparing for any one disaster tends to improve your preparedness for all of them. The actions to take to prepare for most disasters are fundamentally the same: Arrange for clean air, shelter, water, food, etc. For instance, when covid first hit, I had n95 masks on hand because I had set some aside expecting wildfire smoke to be a problem. I had hand sanitizer on hand because it’s useful for controlling disease if one’s supply of water is restricted—minimizing the water needed for hygiene means more for drinking, which buys more time to fix the supply problem. So I’d recommend starting with preparing for the disasters that with extremely high probabilities of affecting you, and pay attention to the ways in which that preparedness increases your odds of survival for lower-likelihood events like a nukes or zombies.
Look into how to harden your home against the types of disasters that it is most likely to experience. Watch videos of ember storms to update your model of how your home might survive a nearby wildfire. Learn where your water, electric, and gas shutoffs are so that you can stop a little household emergency while it’s happening. Do a fire drill; see whether any children in your home can actually open and escape from their bedroom windows when they hear the smoke alarm in the middle of the night. These are the kinds of disasters that threaten you with high probability, and will remain relevant for as long as modern civilization continues.
The drawback to making a disproportionate investment in nuclear shielding is the question of how you’ll find uncontaminated food, water, and air after surviving a hypothetical disaster. If you invest excessively in shielding and inadequately in the basic necessities, it’ll both lower your expected survival duration in most disasters (you will always need food, and only sometimes need to block radiation), and probably decrease your quality of life in the event that the expected disaster never arrives. The benefit to well-thought-out shielding is that it could also reduce the penetration of stray bullets into your home if you got unlucky, and potentially improve your home’s thermal efficiency and even fire and seismic resilience depending on what you use and how you use it. Having a basement, which is much like a bomb shelter, is massively useful for both food storage and sheltering vulnerable people from extreme heat events if there’s a power outage and you can’t run your A/C.
I’ve got a creative idea. What if you just had hunks of metal and basically made a little makeshift tipi out of them? I don’t see why that wouldn’t protect you from those initial gamma rays, or what other risks they might pose.
I think if you’re only concerned about shielding against the initial radiation, you might only need the shield between you and the blast.
I wonder how much metal it would actually take. How much would that cost, and weigh? this suggests that “a few inches of lead” would suffice. So let’s say we’re using the minimum viable lead sheet… If you’re lying or standing behind it, 2′ x 6′ would probably suffice. Say it’s 3″ thick, so roughly 3 cubic feet of lead. this says a cubic foot of lead is about 708lbs, so we’re looking at about 2124lbs of lead, give or take. If you need it thicker than that, it’ll obviously weigh more, at 1 cubic foot per inch at that size. Will the structure of your house be able to handle that kind of load where you’d like to put it? The lowest price estimate that a quick search turns up is $1 per pound, which would make such a shield expensive enough to warrant budgeting for but not out of reach on a tech salary.
My impression of the health risk of a nuclear event is that radioactive particles in the environment persist for quite a long time and create health hazards. I get this impression mostly from having visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone and experienced the strict security protocols making sure nobody left with even radioactive dirt on their clothes. While nuclear-blast doses of gamma radiation will definitely kill you right away, I don’t actually know how to quantify the risk of being near all the radioactive stuff if you came out from behind a person-sized radiation shield immediately after a blast.
Thanks for doing that research! Seems a bit much, price-wise and risk of screwing up (in my case) my apartment floor-wise.
But at the same time, it does strike me as a plausible route to go down. This diagram indicates that the radiation levels go down pretty rapidly. So if you could hang out in that little person-sized space for, I don’t know, 12 hours or so, maybe that’d mostly eliminate the risk? It would certainly be uncomfortable. But since this is a situation where your life depends on it, it doesn’t seem too bad. And you could pay more money to have more space if you’d like.
And if you combine it with, say, a $25 P100 mask + eye goggles after you exit your metal shield, my understanding is that the big thing is you don’t want radioactive fallout particles entering your body. The P100 + goggles + not eating/drinking anything radioactive should basically eliminate that risk. So yeah, this actually sounds kinda plausible.
Don’t let me hurt your curiosity—DIY shelters are absolutely worth learning about, and disaster preparedness is synergistic. There’s a reason the CDC ran that “zombie apocalypse preparedness” campaign back in 2011 -- preparing for any one disaster tends to improve your preparedness for all of them. The actions to take to prepare for most disasters are fundamentally the same: Arrange for clean air, shelter, water, food, etc. For instance, when covid first hit, I had n95 masks on hand because I had set some aside expecting wildfire smoke to be a problem. I had hand sanitizer on hand because it’s useful for controlling disease if one’s supply of water is restricted—minimizing the water needed for hygiene means more for drinking, which buys more time to fix the supply problem. So I’d recommend starting with preparing for the disasters that with extremely high probabilities of affecting you, and pay attention to the ways in which that preparedness increases your odds of survival for lower-likelihood events like a nukes or zombies.
Look into how to harden your home against the types of disasters that it is most likely to experience. Watch videos of ember storms to update your model of how your home might survive a nearby wildfire. Learn where your water, electric, and gas shutoffs are so that you can stop a little household emergency while it’s happening. Do a fire drill; see whether any children in your home can actually open and escape from their bedroom windows when they hear the smoke alarm in the middle of the night. These are the kinds of disasters that threaten you with high probability, and will remain relevant for as long as modern civilization continues.
The drawback to making a disproportionate investment in nuclear shielding is the question of how you’ll find uncontaminated food, water, and air after surviving a hypothetical disaster. If you invest excessively in shielding and inadequately in the basic necessities, it’ll both lower your expected survival duration in most disasters (you will always need food, and only sometimes need to block radiation), and probably decrease your quality of life in the event that the expected disaster never arrives. The benefit to well-thought-out shielding is that it could also reduce the penetration of stray bullets into your home if you got unlucky, and potentially improve your home’s thermal efficiency and even fire and seismic resilience depending on what you use and how you use it. Having a basement, which is much like a bomb shelter, is massively useful for both food storage and sheltering vulnerable people from extreme heat events if there’s a power outage and you can’t run your A/C.
I’ve got a creative idea. What if you just had hunks of metal and basically made a little makeshift tipi out of them? I don’t see why that wouldn’t protect you from those initial gamma rays, or what other risks they might pose.
I think if you’re only concerned about shielding against the initial radiation, you might only need the shield between you and the blast.
I wonder how much metal it would actually take. How much would that cost, and weigh? this suggests that “a few inches of lead” would suffice. So let’s say we’re using the minimum viable lead sheet… If you’re lying or standing behind it, 2′ x 6′ would probably suffice. Say it’s 3″ thick, so roughly 3 cubic feet of lead. this says a cubic foot of lead is about 708lbs, so we’re looking at about 2124lbs of lead, give or take. If you need it thicker than that, it’ll obviously weigh more, at 1 cubic foot per inch at that size. Will the structure of your house be able to handle that kind of load where you’d like to put it? The lowest price estimate that a quick search turns up is $1 per pound, which would make such a shield expensive enough to warrant budgeting for but not out of reach on a tech salary.
My impression of the health risk of a nuclear event is that radioactive particles in the environment persist for quite a long time and create health hazards. I get this impression mostly from having visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone and experienced the strict security protocols making sure nobody left with even radioactive dirt on their clothes. While nuclear-blast doses of gamma radiation will definitely kill you right away, I don’t actually know how to quantify the risk of being near all the radioactive stuff if you came out from behind a person-sized radiation shield immediately after a blast.
Thanks for doing that research! Seems a bit much, price-wise and risk of screwing up (in my case) my apartment floor-wise.
But at the same time, it does strike me as a plausible route to go down. This diagram indicates that the radiation levels go down pretty rapidly. So if you could hang out in that little person-sized space for, I don’t know, 12 hours or so, maybe that’d mostly eliminate the risk? It would certainly be uncomfortable. But since this is a situation where your life depends on it, it doesn’t seem too bad. And you could pay more money to have more space if you’d like.
And if you combine it with, say, a $25 P100 mask + eye goggles after you exit your metal shield, my understanding is that the big thing is you don’t want radioactive fallout particles entering your body. The P100 + goggles + not eating/drinking anything radioactive should basically eliminate that risk. So yeah, this actually sounds kinda plausible.