Question by primalclaws1974: 35-year plan to live in fallout shelter?
Ok, I admit I got the idea from the movie “Blast from the Past”–incase you have not seen the movie, a man builds a very large fallout shelter and by mistake sets the time locks on the shelter for 35 years, with himnself and his pregnant wife inside.
In the movie, he builds rooms like his house, with a kitchen and bedroom with a ceiling. He has a classroom for his son, and room to raise fish to eat, as well as an extensive stock room for “grocery shopping”.
But a lot of the true details are overlooked, to ensure survival for 35 years.
1) What power source did they use? Surely it was not the local power grid, as he thought nuclear war had taken place. What power source could a person use to sustain yourself and two people for 35 years?
My answer: Although it probably would not last 35 years, gasoline generators. Obviously huge tanks, and a room far removed from the rest of the living area to reduce noise and fumes. It would have to be conserved, and possibly alternate sources of heat and light might have to be used, such as candles and a fireplace.
2) Where did all the waste go? Not only human waste, but garbage as well. I have a family of three and I produce close to a 13-gallon bag of trash every day!
3) Could he really store that much food in the fallout shelter? The US Dept. Of Agriculture estimates that the average person in the United States eats per day a total of 4.7 lbs. of food per day. If they ate conservatively, cut that in half or less, 2 pounds per person per day. That’s 76,665 pounds (almost 40 tons) of food and drink for 3 people, and they wouldn’t be real healthy eating less than half of what they needed.
4) Could there by enough space for live animals, refrigeration, and would plants grow with proper light?
5) How would they sustain clean useable water for drinking n bathing?
6) Vitamins wouldn’t last a fraction of this time, let alone almost any food, how would they get their vitamins?
Please answer seriously. Thank you.
Best answer:
Answer by Bradley P
I’m not sure what would be *readily available* for use, for someone to build a massive shelter like this on their property. Some of your assumptions might be correct, in terms of what’s accessible, but they likely would not be able to hold out for more than five years at most.
So I’m going to the *other* extreme, assume that cost is no object and see what *would* work for 35 years straight.
1) I’m thinking the individual had one of two options in terms of power. If this was a rural shelter, it might have been built into a cave or other entrance at a coal mine. In that event you can run a lot for years to *decades* off of the natural gas commonly found in the veins. Granted, there’s leakage issues out the wazoo, but it’s cheap and feasible with old-school technology.
Or, if this were an urban shelter–not the brightest idea if you want it to stay intact, but hey–you could also lay on the steel and leaded shielding a little bit thicker and use a radio-isotope generator. The things *are* simple enough….you use grains of radioactive material, seal them up in shielding, laminate the shielding, using a layer of thermo-couple material to generate electricity as the shielding absorbs radiation and gets hot. It was the original device planned to run pacemakers, back in the late 1950s to early 1960s. All you’d need to do is gain access to the radiology rooms (X-Ray machines, cancer therapy rooms) of a hospital and score some isotope with a half-life of at least that 35 years. And the thermo-couple metal mesh, and the extra shielding. Without getting cancer or getting caught.
2) In a rural shelter based off an old mine, there would be plenty of short-term room to dump waste. Where it gets interesting is with the urban setting.
In the urban setting you’d have to drill a hole, *straight down* at least half a mile deep, and also keep it insulated so that it doesn’t contaminate ground water supplies–so you can keep your well water going as long as possible, before needing to distill it. The hole would have to be for wastes that *can’t* be incinerated or composted on site. This incinerator would of course have to be located in an isolated area of the shelter complex, far enough away that a) venting the thing would not subject anyone to fallout poisoning, and b) using the thing wouldn’t suck the air out of the living quarters.
Again, much easier to do if you have an abandoned coal mine or cave network to work with–doing this in an urban setting takes this from hard to WTF? in nothing flat.
3) Storing edible food isn’t so much of a problem if you can vacuum seal, powder and dehydrate everything in advance. Up through the late 1980s powdered milk and eggs were fairly common things to see at food pantries. If there’s enough room and electricity, you can likewise run a meat-locker type of deep freezer the size of a small building, that’s not an issue.
The issue is Question 5), regarding water. If you can’t vent to the outside, eventually the air inside will dry out. Which means you’d better have a *clean* groundwater source and *also* recycle and reclaim water as much as possible from day one. Meaning you use “grey water” from the showers and sinks to flush the toilet, then incinerate the toilet wastes to *distill the water back* out of the sewage as much as possible. Even so, having a Plan C is also a must–enough supplies of bicarbonates in storage that you can chemically break *them* down into water if need be as well.
Even so….like I said, people would have to be *anal* about showers, laundry and toilet use from day one. Hygiene would go to crap, literally.
4) Live animals? Beyond a single pet, it’s doubtful. Meat sources, even aquatic ones, do require considerable space, water and resources to *live*, never mind breeding, slaughter and cleanup. It would be *much* easier to just use dried and powdered sources, and then soy substitutes when the original sources run out.
Refrigeration isn’t an issue so long as there’s electricity and space to run the gear safely (without overheating or freon leaks).
Live plants can live underground, given sufficient water and artificial light sources. It’s called “hydroponics” and you can look it up. Apparently a lot of folks are growing their own [*ahem*] tomatoes in pods specifically made for basement use…never mind the hippie/stoner trappings on some of the brochures. ^_~
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