Bruce Beach is a VERY interesting man. A man you could spent the last days of the planet with. He is building a fall out shelter deluxe up here in crazy land Canada. I'll keep editing this blog entry until I get everything I want on it. But here is something to think about.

From: "Bruce Beach" http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060222_chicken_teeth.html

The world keeps changing and our viewpoints keep changing.
I get lots of emails asking questions about radiation.
A common question is - "At what point will you lockdown the shelter?
"Well, maybe never - and the reason is that radiation doesn't work like most people thinks it works.
Let us examine some typical scenarios.

Suppose the outside radiation level was -
a. 5R
b. 10 R
c. 20 R
d. 40 R
e. 100 R
f. 500 R
g. 1000 R
h. 5000 R

Lets examine strategies for each of these cases.
My goal is to make sure no male in our shelterover the age of 18 gets exposed to more than 200R.
I would prefer, even then, that the cumulative exposure was in smaller increments over several days.
Anyway, this is one advantage of a large group shelter is that you have a number of personnel to share the exposure.
So let us say that we send out a guard / doorkeeper / triage team to stand at the front door - the property gate or a barricade at the top of the dead end road that leads to our property.
The question is -what happens to them and to the people that they greet in each of the above cases?

Case A.
5R - The team can go out for twelve hours and will get a dose of 60R.
We could use the same Team three days in a row and would only need two teams for 24 hour coverage.
Over a period of two weeks we would need ten teams -maybe twenty people and no one would get sick.
The people coming from the outside, however, would theoretically be exposed to 120R per day - and in five days would reach the level of 100% fatality
A simple model like this -of course has many problems.
It is assuming that the radiation is constantwhere in actuality it decays -
(or increases with the arrival of new fallout)
and the refugees may be getting some sheltering inside a building somewhere
that reduces the radiation by half -
or they may be sleeping on the ground say in sleeping bags -
and that would greatly increase their rate of exposure.
However, we will stick with this simple model because it demonstrates some principles.

Case B.
10R. In this instance the radiation figure is double and we would wish to perhaps cut the guards exposure to 5 hours per time.
It is inconvenient to make guards exposure time very short -
because each time you bring them back into the shelter clean areas -
you have to decontaminate them.
At 10R or 240R per day the people from outside the shelter will of course get the 100% fatality dose in less than three days.

Case C.
20R per hour.Two or three hour exposures for the guards and less than two days for those from outside to get the 100% fatality dose.
Maybe a week if they are in a house - especially if they go to the basement.

Case D. 40R per hour. An hour or two safe outside for the guards -but about a half a day for those walking up from outside to reach 50% fatality dose -
meaning that 50% of them would die even if we took them into the shelter,
if they had only been exposed for 12 hours.
That is for healthy males.
Older frailer people and children - go sooner.
Well - don't go sooner.
It can still take them days to die -
but it just means that they were more assuredly done in -
at that time.

Case E.
100R.
Best to rotate the guards hourly.
If we are actually getting traffic.
Maybe staying down in the shelter and just going up to answer the door.
(Sorry - we are full).
No need to tell people that if they have been out there for six hours -
there is a 100% probability they are going to be dead in a couple of weeks -
whether we bring them into the shelter or not.
Even if we had room -
the reason we wouldn't want to bring them in -
is that while radiation is not contagious -
the rest of the diseases that it lets loose in their bodies -
are.(Radiation kills the cells that fight disease).

Cases F and G -
500R to 1000R may sound ridiculous -
but I sent you a few months ago a US government estimate of 1200R in 'low' radiation areas in case of a nuclear war.Case H.5000R.
Yep, it possible and higher.
The closer one is downwind to a nuke -
the higher the radiation will be.
The good news is -
that it decays very rapidly -
so a shelter will still protect you.
Further away -
say a day from where the explosion took place -
(that is to say it takes the fallout -a day to arrive) -
well then -
it will take it a week to decay ten fold
from what it arrives at.
We call that the 7/10 rule.
In other words - if it arrives a day later at 100R -
it will take it a week to get down to 10R.
Most radiation decays away -
a couple of weeks after the last nuke explodes -
and then we are into a different subject of comparing areas of safety -
decontamination -
recovery response and so forth.

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My purpose here -
has been four-fold.

1. To show the importance of shelter.

2. To show that it is a pressing short-term need.

3. To show that one can appear to be very casual about being outside the shelter for short time periods at particular radiation levels.

4. But - even at relatively low radiation levels - under 50R -it is going to probably be very quiet outside in a few weeks as most of the people will have died off.
People will be almost as scarce as hen's teeth.
Well -not really -
because I expect about 20% to survive -
but they may not be too healthy and happy.

-----------

Today, I was also going to discuss DU (Depleted Uranium)
and while I have room -
I think that I will put it off to another time -
because I feel that I am overloading you.
Some people like getting this sort of detail -
and others feel it just confuses them.

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The conventional wisdom -
among those who follow these things
-is that Israel will not attack Iran until after the elections the end of this month.
Also - it appears the Iranian Oil Bourse is delayed.
Isn't going to happen March 20th.
Same thing happened last year.
Some knowledgeable people think that it isn't that important anyway.
Personally I feel it is.
A sense of urgency always propels me forward to get more done.
Have hopefully made headway on some projects here today -
but will need time to complete them.
One is never finished.
There is always more one can do to prepare.
With me it is a lifestyle -
but most people would rather ignore the threat
altogether.
There is surely a happy balance.
But that is different for everyone.
I just happen to be way out there on this -
but I do surely wish many times that I had more people to assist me.
Anyway - each of us are supposed to do what we think is God's calling for us -
and perhaps it is His Will - (I hope)
that there be at least one far out old guy to send you all this info.
Or not.

Peace and love,Bruce
http://ca.f882.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=DawnSayer@webpal.org&YY=71807&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b