Bomb shelters

So, now that getting nuked is a thing again, has anyone else given serious thought to constructing a bomb/fallout shelter? Most of the manuals and documentation and plans date back to the 50's, or at least the hippy/survival fad of the 70's, or was written by paranoid far-right wingnuts in the 80's. Is there anything to improve on the old designs and protocols, now that we know more about radiation, EMP, and nuclear winter?

>>577 Building the shelter underground is a must, this is the best position for a shelter that protects it from the attack and discovery by adversaries. Depending on how any individuals/organisms are planned to stay inside, you're going to want to stock up a suitable amount of food, water, medical equipment, technology, clothing, etc. to satisfy them all. The shelter should have a spherical shape and should have no sharp edges as these are weak spots and can result in the shelter being destroyed, a sphere is your best bet. You probably won't want to breathe the air outside the shelter, you you will want to filter it, or invest in an air recycling system if you can afford it, water electrolysis is also a good means of producing oxygen for life, and hydrogen for possible weaponry or power... Even if the shelter has the materials to sustain life, you could deteriorate due to stress and non-simulation, so you are going to want to create a small library or have a computer inside with software saved on it. If you manage to survive and plan to return to the surface, you will want a full body suit of some kind with a mask to protect your orifices and filter the air. A diesel vehicle should be your means of escape, a pickup truck should suffice, you could keep it in a below ground ditch to preserve it in the event of an attack, think of a water basin...

>So, now that getting nuked is a thing again I would argue that it always was a thing... but... >has anyone else given serious thought to constructing a bomb/fallout shelter? I have, but I don't have my own property, s unfortunately I would just need to find a local basement (also my town still has community fallout shelters). I have a suspicion that you want an info thread, so here ya go: I am also going to dump some information in design

part 2 >Approved Technical standards for the US Department of Energy https://energy.gov/ehss/services/nuclear-safety/department-energy-technical-standards-program/doe-approved-technical

my PDFs didnt upload, so here

>>577 part three- a focus on ammunition storage facilities which are meant to keep a blast in, above ground construction makes it a bit easier too

>>587 last post >The thickness required to weaken gamma radiation from fallout is far less than that needed to shield against initial gamma radiation. Fallout radiation has less energy than a nuclear detonation's initial radiation. For fallout radiation, a relatively small amount of shielding material can provide adequate protection. Figure 23-1 gives an idea of the thickness of various materials needed to reduce residual gamma radiation transmission by 50 percent. >The principle of half-value layer thickness is useful in understanding the absorption of gamma radiation by various materials. According to this principle, if 5 centimeters of brick reduce the gamma radiation level by one-half, adding another 5 centimeters of brick (another half-value layer) will reduce the intensity by another half, namely, to one-fourth the original amount. Fifteen centimeters will reduce gamma radiation fallout levels to one-eighth its original amount, 20 centimeters to one-sixteenth, and so on. Thus, a shelter protected by 1 meter of dirt would reduce a radiation intensity of 1,000 cgys per hour on the outside to about 0.5 cgy per hour inside the shelter.

The most basic, crude shelter would be a deep trench with something substantial laid over the top. Starting from there you can make it as fancy and complex as you like. But you're gonna need clean air, water, food, heat, medicine, and human waste disposal at a bare minimum, ie a basic life-support system.

>>590 A simpler one is just an interior door angled against a wall in your house, like in When The Wind Blows. But that didn't work too well in the movie, as I recall...

>water electrolysis is also a good means of producing oxygen for life, and hydrogen for possible weaponry or power... but the energy needed to separate hydrogen in water is more than, then energy you could get from burning it

>>655 also the hydrogen that you seperate for 'power' needs to be combined with just as much oxygen as you removed from it in order to produce power. you need some way to add energy into the system.

>>657 nevertheless, water cycling, with potentially a stage of hydrogen/oxygen seperation could be viable in a system, its just unsustainable long term. if we're assuming the surface is not an option, it might be prudent to look down, to geothermal. of course solar (or even, I wonder if you could harvest meaningful energy from ambient radioactivity on the surface, or outside of the main sheilding in any case). but in a broad sense just, it almost seems like we are diving into this question too quickly, before establishing some basics of the scenario we are working in, or the boundaries of possiblity. how long do we need to remain in this shelter? a week is very different from a month is very different from the rest of our lives. and to be frank, probably the best way to start is to get into a place thats neither a probable nuclear target, nor a likely fallout zone. regrettably the most serious up to date maps for that sort of thing are from the 70's and 80's or so, but I think we can still assume some basic principals. A person in the middle of the woods with limited preparation might do a lot better than a person in NYC, simply by virtue of not being attacked directly. The ttaps study has some discussion of different simulations about nuclear war, but it seems the power of new computer simulations, and just, changing world probably merit taking that study with a bit more salt than we would have when it was new. nevertheless, the verdict from it is rather stark: essentially that the surface would be unable to sustain populations for the meaningful future, and that its possible for the survival of human kind, and many many other animals, would be in great risk, in some of the possible scenarios. if we are to be preparing for that level of cataclysm, no reasonable level of back yard bomb shelter is going to save you. you will need some protection from radiation, but more importantly you need a closed life support system that can produce and sustain your population, for an indefinite duration, without resupplies. this means people, with skills to fix things, and the tools, and the replacement tools and the replacement parts, to last quite some time indeed. of course potentially the air out side will get breathable after some time, with filtering sooner (though one would worry about the risk posed by slight inefficiencies in the filtration system). but even if after a few years you're able to rise out of your tank and see the bleak and barren world, you need to deal with a small population, potentially alone. of course perhaps that's the time you pull out your radio, and finding no signals all silently take your cyanide pills. but if the ambition is to live for as long as possible, then the work has really only just started.

In a major nuclear war most of the targets will be in the northern hemisphere. Wind currents will probably keep most of the radioactive fallout circulating there. If there's a 'nuclear winter' effect, it might be more severe in the northern hemisphere for the same reason. So I guess if I survived the initial blast and chaos in my shelter, I'd try to scavenge my way down to South America as far as possible. Europeans could try Africa I suppose.

>>660 If you are willing to invest so much in building a shelter, is it not more prudent to simply move to S.A. or some other safer zone now? Looking at maps of fallout over the US based on season, perhaps there would be some places where you could reasonably hide from it at most seasons (perhaps NW nevada or SW Oregon), but as you note and as TTAPS also suggests, its quite likely that Nuclear winter would be more pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere. It goes without saying that in this sort of scenario infrastructure will be damaged. thats like, the whole point. It would be trivial to move today to some more desierable site in S. or C. America, while after an attack it would be a slow, risky, and uncertain journey to a place where perhaps they dont even want you, or have room for you. If you really want to prepare for a nuclear war, and if S. America is better then where you're at now, go to S. America, dont waste your time on a bomb shelter in a place that you cannot live in long term.

Not sure how related it is, but I'm more and more yearning for some type of underground bunker for sleeping in that is extremely soundproof and extremely easy to control sensory wise. I was thinking something completely underground can easily be controlled to fit my needs as someone with ocd and sensitive to noise.

>>783 Some sort of environment room would be neat. An oversized HVAC system to do a range of temperatures and humidities, noise isolation in the walls. There's a company called CoeLux who do some neat sunlight simulators too, and their patents give a lot of detail if you were looking to construct one: https://www.google.com/patents/US20140133125 The neat blue-sky effect is from the nanoparticle layer sadly, so it'd be the hardest part to do.

>>784 This certainly looks neat. I'm not sure if I could afford such a setup sadly, but it would be a fun thing to achieve. I could imagine having a safe room type vault I can spend days in at a time to work on things in seclusion.

>>783 You should be aware that self-built underground rooms have often become death traps, because ventilation is being overlooked, and suffocating from carbon(di)oxide happens quickly and unbeknownst to the dying person.

>>577 Slightly off topic. If I had the money to build a house to these specifications how feasable would it be? >EMP Sheilded >Bomb Resistant >Can fend off attacks/assaults ? I was thinking some concrete walls would help if they're thick.

>>816

This is a cool thread, but as a side note, I encourage you to stop watching the news. The sensationalism breeds extreme fear. We are nowhere near the realization of nuclear war, especially hen compared to the late 60s.

>>819 Although I agree that news sensationalism is bad, I will disagree that we are nowhere near the realization of nuclear war. I base this assumption on several points: >1: distrust ins strategic areas is higher than in the past years because of recent developments in international politics and scientific development of countries such as north korea. much like the USSR, north korea has only nuclear weapons that can even the playing field in combat against the united states conventional forces. In other words, if a conventional war breaks out with NK, there is a likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used to compensate for inferior technology and a vastly underpowered and underequipped military. >2: proxy wars are becoming increasingly prevalent in 3rd world countries (much like the vietnam/soviet afghan war), as non aligned enemies such as ISIS are defeated (i.e. since there is no single enemy, nations will look back at rivals). evidence of this can also be seen in the united states discussing lethal aid to the Ukraine which has been at war with Russia unofficially for some time now. >3:an increasing use of warfare producing tangible and possibly effective strategic strikes with no rules of engagement may introduce the possibility of conventional and possibly nuclear based retaliation in response to a significant enough event The counterargument to these points s that modern enemies are often independent, and although possibly state sponsored, unlike in the cold war, not polarized by nationalism and patriotism, but rather independent beliefs, which means that thanks to everybody hating everyone, nations are less likely to have an "us against them" mentality towards another nation.

>>820 The third point meant to say cyberwarfare

How would one filter air in a post-fallout situation?

>>985 Use the stock lungs you were provided and enjoy your last days.

>>985 You can't, air filters are at best functional short term

>>985 Make your own air the same way space stations do, water electrolysis. >acquire water from outside >distill probably radioactive water to acquire nonradioactive H2O >electrolyse H2O into H2 and O2 >flush hydrogen outside >keep oxygen Your main concern is generating enough electricity to power all that soykaf.

>>985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cab2Az4zBCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCKZW265FJw My God, the lains around here can't be bothered doing simple Googling before flapping their gums. Useless fuarrrking stoners. It's just beyond me how anyone can have the information of the entire world at their fingertips and still spout unqualified, irrelevant, uninformed garbage. Anyway, air filters come in commercial and home made designs, there are electric-powered and hand or cycle cranked versions. An ioniser might be a good idea, make fallout particles drop out of the air so you can vacuum them up.

Reminder: don't use shipping containers

>>2246 Use school buses instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxYeEog4mT8

>>2246 Shipping containers are fine, you just have to understand the material you are using. Shipping containers have all their structural integrity on the corners and bottom. The sides and top exist to keep weather out. You might be able to get away with rolling the container over and using it upside down, but you would probably have better luck with a series of braces, supports, or other supporting material to take the weight off the metal skin that is the roof, including a thicker secondary roof secured to the corners of the container.

>>2246 That only happens with fiber glass shipping containers, you have to make sure you're getting steel. Also >>2269

>>2272 the steel will rust out

>>2668 literally anything will fall apart on a long enough time frame.

>>2269 Is there anything cheaper than steel that will allow you to build a slab across the top of a steel container? The corners will easily support the weight. Of course, between laying/pouring a slab on top of the container and reinforcing the sides of the pit the container is in to prevent collapse from lateral pressure, you might as well use cinderblocks or something else easy to work with. AFAICT containers are bad candidates for burial, but do work fine if you decide to berm them. As long as the dirt has somewhere to push against that's softer than the walls of the container (like open air), it's fine. If one were going to lay a large amount of soil atop one, you might need a stiffened slab to pour onto.

Nukes aren't a thing again. There's no big threat from nukes these days, just the usual sensational fear of the same brand people have for things like terrorism that really have less a chance to hurt you than slipping and cracking your head on your toilet. But nobody is prepping for toilet bludgeoning. A bomb shelter / bug-out hole isn't gonna save you from biosphere collapse. In fact, a good nuclear war would probably be better for our life support system in the long run than what we're doing now. That's fuarrrked up but here we are. Wish we could just glass a few of the biggest industrial countries and give the rest of human life a fighting chance.

>standard containers You gotta have curved ceilings, to distribute the weight of the above around. This is basic stuff. And a ever sturdier slabs, so long as it's a flat ceiling, is an expensive way to (not!) prevent ceiling collapse. Don't be the idiot who thought that burying themself in a container would be something other than a deathtrap.

>bomb/fallout shelter >hippy/survival fad The only 'hippy' thing about the fallout shelter fad was the lack of thorough understanding of the situation. I don't mean to deride their motives or ideas. Those are laudable. But their execution is, often, caricacatic. Many built shelters considering nuclear as chemical explosivity. To point, 1505318407972-1.jpg ("cozy") shows a shelter unlikely to remain habitable long enough to withstand nuclear fallout. >how long do we need to remain in this shelter? Pessimistically, indefinitely. This is why: How should one construct shelters? First, one person doing it himself, while possible, is not going to yeild the best result. Such a man would have to have complete survival skills, but what skills will be needed during and after what sorts of catastrophe? Socia are necessary. Socia beyond nuclear family. Beyond 'head's descendants' family. Socia for specialization. The shelter must be at least commodious for sufficient persons for specialization. Require autarky. But don't prevent inter-shelter trade. Treaty with other socia before the excrement hits the air conditioning. Don't forget would-be hermits. Hermits are persons, too. Hermits can be useful, too. (I'll probably not be a hermit. Though hermitude is in temperament. If too many hermits...) Notice I don't specify 'political' economic systems. Efficient production of base resources is the matter. Cultural preservation is second. (Cultural novation be slowed (never stopped) till prosperity returns.) Pirate all now. Keep all organized, redundant. Embody monuments.

>>3613 >But nobody is prepping for toilet bludgeoning. Someone hasn't been reading the helmet thread on /diy/.

>>577 >Those pics Where do you bathroom?

>>3619 lol but seriously, can I get a link? I actually would love to see the DIY helmets that lain builds

>>3616 Depends on the size of the chamber. There are plenty of mineshafts and such with flat ceilings held up by simple wooden beams, and those are plenty wider than standard containers are. And those mineshafts are far far deeper, under far more pressure. You might have to put in a few pillars and do some very serious corrosion-proofing, but there's no reason why you couldn't bury a container a good few meters underground with no problems. Now if you wanted an auditorium, you'll want to get some engineers on board and figure out a dome as you said.

>>577 I'd prefer a tiny sub so I don't have to get buried alive. Better yet a small spacecraft so I can leave before they actually make a police force up there. Making an underground room that recycles it's own waste and makes oxygen is akin to living in a tiny spacecraft or sub anyway. But you can't run away if your nation loses and they're coming. The hard part is getting something into the sky. I feel like they hid the Saturn V designs to keep me here. Sub it is. All you mostly need for that's main design is an industrial sized water heater tank. Image related is probably 50k gallons though they have plastic 10k gallon ones that poor people might use to hide in lakes. The radiation might be absorbed by the water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water ^ Says miscommunications are difficult through water. I don't understand science enough to know if it implies that ionization radiation would be much slowed down though. You figure you could just put lead plates all over the outside of the sub though, it's going to be floating anyway I suspect and pure lead ingots are not that expensive. Just line the top parts. Or does the ionization radiation bounce off the ground? I don't even know. Still, I'd die of hypertension inside a hole in the ground that you can't escape from as the fire burns above you. The ocean you will never be found. Even in shallow waters there is far too much area to search.

>>3613 >filename

>>4090 That's literally the next line in that comic. It's an old doujin by L0cke. It's fuarrrking hilarious, check it out seriously >>4089 I mean while we're in the realm of fantasy, I'd like a Tardis so I could just go to a different time and dimension entirely. Not like any of us are going to get a self-sustaining private submarine, let alone a spacecraft. Until then I'll probably just hide in a basement or an alleyway with a needle in my arm.

>>4093 >trying to trick me into reading one of your dojins I'm never going to read ANY dojins so long as I live. My image is from Yotsuba&! if not a parody picture from it.

>>4093 And why would surviving a nuclear war in a hole in the ground not be a fantasy too?

>>4095 Your loss, as if I care buddy :)

>paranoid far-right wingnuts Interesting insult. I'd assume everyone here is a paranoid wingnut; I mean, you want to build a bunker fore fuarrrk's sake. Your issue is the politics of the author, which is retarded. >inb4 I must be le boogeyman, I'm a lolbert in5 libertarians are far right now sage for off-topic sperging.

>>577 nuclear weapons are not real you can even eat radioactive material https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmJN-LMPnX0

>>4114 Have you ever been to Goiânia?

>>4114 Alexander didn't find it too tasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

>>3595 >>3616 >>4079 Why not stack a couple of containers filled with soil on top if it? But I doubt that containers are the easiest to work with as they need a lot of adjustments to be livable in a post-nuke situation

Digging a 100 m deep well is probably the simplest way to survive a 100 kiloton airburst nuclear explosion at 1 km. All of the radiation and heat, and most of the blast wave is absorbed and reflected by the ground. 15 megaton laydown explosion makes only a 76 m deep crater. The world record for deepest hand dug well is 390 m, dug from 1858-1862. Digging a 100 m well can be done with hand tools, placing anchor points for climbing ropes, and blocking the shaft with nets every 10 m to catch rocks. Choose a location with a water table lower than 100 m. After the fallout decays, rock climb out of the well.

I just plan to be turned to light by the Holy Nuke and being dissolved in the great Universe. It's just passing from a system to another. Don't be afraid. All worship the Holy Nuke and accept your faith as a worthless piece of meat.

I live to spite the crazy, evil psychopaths who built tens of thousands of nuclear bombs to kill everyone. I suggest you do the same if you don't want them to succeed.

>>577 It's not nukes which people should hide from (ultimately), maybe in sand countries it's something to think of. Nukes only happen in: >military/terrorist bases and the devastation is usually smaller radius due to ground burst >air burst is unlikely since milbases would've had a shelter underneath and fully-equipped with airburst immune tech to escape efficiently within the next few hours. The only nearing threat is a nuke reactor meltdown, or broken dam floodleak, riots, of which can be prevented by "not being in the wrong place". Not gonna be off-topic but I'm a fan of seapunk, off-site bombshelters, and other means.

Once they created the first cobalt bombs in 2015, their target is now civilians. Salted nuclear bombs are useless against military targets with CBRN protection. They are only good at mass murdering civilians and contaminating the land for decades. Fortunately, this evil can be prevented by decontaminating the soil as soon as possible after detonation. Just remove the top few inches of soil, and the radioactive Cobalt-60 is completely removed from the ground.

https://underminers.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/disco_daves_tunnelling_guide_pdf_version_kf.pdf How to dig a tunnel with hand tools. Good for cheap bunkers.

>>5146 You're being overly dramatic. If you want to kill lots of foreign civilians without sparking any geopolitical outrage, just keep drone-striking them. Barack "Peace Prize" Obama did that for eight years without any significant complaint from foreign governments, and Donald "I'm Totally Not Like Obama" Trump has continued exactly that for an additional four - again without geopolitical comment.

>>5103 >Nukes only happen in: military/terrorist bases and the devastation is usually smaller radius due to ground burst That's what you assume, the truth is the only examples we have of atomic bombs being used were in civilian areas.

>>5103 also industrial targets, and high-altitude detonations for EMP bursts. If the nooks went off I'd probably die pretty much right away, being within 50 miles of a major military base. OTOH I'd get a beautiful fireworks show before that.

What about tsunamis, tornados, etc? Could a shelter like a bomb shelter protect against these?

>>5496 if it can survive a bomb, it can survive a tornado. It might not survive a hurricane due to flooding, it may also not survive a tsunami due to flooding or earthquakes. The forces involved in nuclear explosions are >Wind forces (and debris) >High Temperatures >Radiation (and shielding/lack of shielding) >Fallout (surface and water) >Minor seismic effects depending on the yield There are many engineering formulae for developing blast proof engineering projects and structures, I would recommend some books if I had them around. But the most important aspect of a shelter is that it is sturdy, prevents contamination of outside water or air, and it shields you from heat and radiation. Most fallout shelters have been converted for tornado shelters since they see far more use.

If a nuclear nation-state really wanted to do something unthinkable, they could set off a series of ocean blasts that would create tsunamis big enough to wipe out an entire coast, extending a considerable distance inland. This is physically possible, but supposedly rejected by major players as too horrible to consider.

>>5548 > rejected by major players as too horrible to consider Whew! We should be safe then. Actually I live near the sea and have this weird surreal fear of tsunamis.