Gold & Silver Forum - Basement Fallout Shelter

Expedient shelter can be made inside your home. Not to protect against blast force overpressures, but effective enough against fallout if you are 5 miles out from the detonation site.

What you require to reduce the gamma ray penetration is MASS, weight.

Did not read Melbos link. Any kind of mass will reduce your gamma ray absorption. You could fill a kiddie pool or a waterbed mattress laying overhead of your basement. Use sacks of sand or concrete above or around you. If your canned goods are in boxes, stack them around you.

Bruce Clayton showed a Dining room table as a nesting spot with stuff stacked deep around it on all sides and also on top of it. A concrete or masonry wall has done half the battle for you, but you still need to have about 200 lbs of mass surrounding you on all sides that fallout may emit gamma rays toward you.

Dirt is a good source of mass. How cheap is potting soil at walmart these days.

Cresson Kearny worked at the Oakridge Laboratory, a TN based Dept of Energy funded nuclear research lab. He assembled NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL SKILLS, a book the govt published that you can google for free download.

If you live within 5 miles of a large city or major military base, you might want to download that book. Kearny shows how you can dig a variety of shelters and survive the overpressure generated by a weapon strike. One of the projects was to recruit average families and see how long it took them to make a shelter, from start to finish. With a few basic tools, shovel, pick, axe; it could be done in about 12 hours. These are Trench Shelters with dirt removed used to cover wooden overlays of logs, plywood, or a solid wood door.

If you are downwind of a suspected target area, you need to be able to Shelter In Place for about 2 weeks.

Kearny's book is a must read.