Almost Every Survival Novel You've Ever Read is an Optimistic Fantasy!

All the books that have stressed finding a secluded spot, raising livestock and crops is hopelessly flawed.

The only hope you would have is to sail to South America, and scratch out a living there. Bear in mind the locals might not take too kindly to someone from a country that helped create this catastrophe.

Also, the radioactive smoke particles ingested would be over 100X more lethal than the external 38 Rem / year mentioned above.

For those of you who still want to bunker down, Cesium 137 has a half-life of 30 years. It would take 100 years for the radiation to become 1/10 of what it was initially.

Got enough food buckets for that?

Last Edited by Cheyenne on 08/04/2018 07:40 PM

reading doesn't mean dick unless you practice and are ready to implement.

great book though.

5*.

I don't know, the wildlife of Chernobyl seem to be doing very well. To them, ANYTHING is better than the presence of humans, even a nuclear meltdown.

On The Beach was one of my favorites, I'll take mine with a milkshake and a smile.

WARNING: Math Content

So let's do the math. We know that for most radiation detectors, mRem / hr is CPM / 1200. (According to Blackcat Systems). As mentioned earlier, 450 burning nuclear plants may generate 5,175 CPM.

5175 / 1200 = 4.3 mRem per hour. There's 8,760 hours in a year.

4.3 X 8760 = 37668 mRem / hr or 38 Rads.

500 Rads cumulative exposure will likely kill you; 100 - 200 will make you sick (and put you out of the survival fight).

This level of background radiation will make small game disappear and sicken any larger animal, since they don't have a radiation shelter to go to.

Plants will absorb radioactive elements and be lethal to eat.

No shit. Survival requires optimism.

Bear in mind with this scenario, there would be no liquidators in rad suits fighting the fires, or entombing the reactors / pools in concrete.

The cores would naturally burn until little was left.

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

The threat of radiation is always overstated.

Fukushima and Chernobyl were furiously fought until partial containment.

Imagine if no one did anything to curtail the damage.

Again, the average CPM from Fukushima in North America rose by 11.5 CPM. We can multiply that out by 450 nuclear plants and get a yearly dose. From there we can estimate time to illness and death.

I loved the part in the end where the guy takes one last drive in his sports car. Do what you love until the end.

For those of you wondering how much shielding would be needed to protect against 5,175 CPM, let me introduce the idea of a halving thickness.

This is the amount of material to reduce the gamma radiation by half. For concrete, it is 2.2". For dirt, it is 3.5".

To reduce this level of radiation to anywhere near normal levels, at least 17" of dirt would be needed. That gets you down to around 160 CPM - or Colorado Springs on a bad day.

I was always opposed to nuclear power.
The only thing the plants ultimately do is boil water!

Yesh, quite mindboggling.

And without water they go into meltdown.

The only plant design I would feel comfortable with would be one that if the workers were teleported away, it would go into a safe mode - for thousands of years, without attendants.

We are not even close to that now with any working reactor.

The unstated problem with these plants isn't the reactor. It's the spent fuel pools. They require active pump cooling, just like the reactor. Spent rods generate enough heat to boil water for years after they are taken out of service.

Unlike the reactor, these pools are often covered by just a steel shed. Once the water has boiled off, the zirconium cladding will burn - the rest is history, as they say.

It's like those shows, 'Naked and Afraid'!!! I cuss at the television watching that shit!

Go with Thorium!

Thorium is a great fuel, does have some scaleability issues but can be paralleled. A reactor shutdown is as simple as turning off a fan. The slug of thorium drops into a graphite cask and cools... forever.

The problem with thorium has to do with men's hearts.

Governments are addicted to nuclear weapons, and you can't make fissile material with thorium reactors. What's the fun in that?

what was Halirrhothius cutting down?

Chernobyl hasn't turned into a delightful playground with gumdrop smiles.

Portions of the area that were not decontaminated still have significant radiation. The graveyard, for example, had readings of 2,640 CPM in 2009. From the website Chernobyl Gallery:

"Most of Pripyat was decontaminated in the weeks following the explosion however the graveyard is one exception (14-22 uSv/h), it being hard to remove topsoil and keep graves intact, and therefore we spent only 15 minutes on site."

Some of the clothing worn by those nearest to the explosion is still there, abandoned, in a pile. Those uniforms still register close to 40,000 CPM.

Maltdown in GLP lingo, bro.

It's not so much the reactors but the spent fuel. Boron control rods drop into the reactor, and in theory anyway, end the reaction.

All that spent fuel sitting at each nuke plant, however, needs to constantly be cooled with water until it has decayed enough for storage.

They have back up generators, which of course only have to have one weeks worth of diesel (per the NRC) on hand. What could possibly go wrong that would last longer than a week? </sarc> That what happened at Fukushima

Yeah, I hear ya OP, it is often overlooked in most of these books, particularly the EMP ones. In many other doom events they probably could keep the plants operational, at least for a while. But even in something like a James Wesley Rawles financial collapse, you probably still will have a few go critical.

Every novel ends up with the main characters having awesome Sigs or Glocks or AR or AK. Reality is that most survivors would be lucky to have an old single shot 16 gauge that grandpa had and half a box of birdshot.

Fuggin smart post n fir

The plant(s) had a convection emergency cooling system. Cool water from the lake, river, ocean, whatever would circulate through cooling pipes, the flow driven by thermal driving head. The emergency system did not engage immediately, in case power was restored within a short time.

Hopefully

Just imagine surviving off the land for 3 weeks.

Even for Naked and affraid people...it's not easy.

Just imagine no shower for 3 weeks! (or no brushing teeth for 3 weeks).

the doomsday bombs are cobalt-60 bombs.



the radiation from nuclear plants would be mostly cesium, alpha beta radiation, gamma radiation for 14 days. cobalt is all gamma, the kind that you can't avoid.

Russia dumping all the US treasuries is not a good sign at all. we should not underestimate the madness of the human race, the massive theft has already occurred, the anger isn't there because there's just alot of nice people having a good time still, and the really down and out are just totally powerless to do anything. the people stealing all the money are just too blinded by greed to care what comes next, the consequences of what they've done. there's no reporting or knowledge or understanding because they've corrupted the youth from the cradle. or there is reporting by a few but it's the GENERAL PUBLIC that does not care. they are lied to by so many they don't know what the hell to think. defense contractors hiring propoganda douchebags, militarized 'talk radio', war whores on every channel. the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

Japan built several of their plants below sea level They had to dig down to find bed rock and once the plant was built the emergency generators on the bottom floor of the plant. Once the water poured over the sea wall the first things taken out were those emergency generators. A case of poor design not allowed here. I can imagine Chinas 21 nuclear power reactors operating on 8 separate sites and 28 under construction.

like the man says, it seeped into the lower layers of soil, and eventually into the groundwater. so it's safe for surface dwellers but humans who dig wells or tap the groundwater for irrigation, will get radioactive water, radioactive crops.

I don't have to imagine!