We know that the risk of nuclear war is higher than it’s ever been before. That is why it’s very important that you have a plan. Whoa! What the hell? Hey man, good night. Well, isn’t this a coincidence? Perfect timing to do a video on how to survive nuclear war. I couldn’t be in better company. I got a nuclear physicist in here. If you walk me through this, I guess I might as well get cozy because we’re going to be here for a while. What we’re going to talk about today is a fictional scenario. We’re going to take you through step by step what you can do to prepare a shelter to guarantee that you’re going to be shielded against the radiation and how to use your scintillator or Geiger counter in one of these events.

And you can hopefully extrapolate what we’re going to talk about to wherever you are. Nuclear war starts, the Minuteman missile silo is probably 300 or 400 miles south of here, gets struck by a ground burst detonation, and we have what, a few hours to prepare? Six hours. Six hours or so to prepare for the fallout comes. Now, if you could quickly explain like I’m two years old, what is nuclear radiation and why do we have to worry about it? The initial burst of the radiation with it, that would affect a few miles around the blast zone.

What we’re looking at is the fallout. That’s the stuff. It was a ground burst. It would have sucked up a whole bunch of dirt and dust and whatever. By the time it gets to us, it’s going to be lethal enough, but it won’t be as bad as straight down wind from the ground burst. So at the epicenter, that’s where the radiation is strongest, and then it dissipates progressively outwards. The fallout stuff is being carried along with the wind. It’ll come down within 50 miles or so, gravel size, sand size or whatever.

By the time it gets to us, it’ll look like ash is coming down, maybe could come down with rain or snow depending on the season. What do we do then in these precious hours that we have until the fallout gets here to prepare? So I have a house with a basement and the plan is I will have one corner that I think I can retrofit to make it into a fallout shelter with enough shielding to keep the gamma radiation down to a level that I won’t get sick. You might be good after a couple of days to use the rest of your basement, but for the initial stuff where you really want to have as much mass between you and the radioactive material.

So what can shield against the different types of radiation and what are the different types of radiation? There are three types of radiation, alpha, beta and gamma. Those are what we’re concerned about in the fallout scenario. So alpha radiation is very easily stopped. A sheet of paper will stop the alpha radiation. So the only way alpha radiation can hurt you is if you ingest or inhale the radioactive material. So that’s not going to be an issue in my basement. Beta radiation is an electron. It’s shielded by four millimeters of plastic. So again, it doesn’t take much to shield.

Gamma radiation is the most dangerous in that shit at the fan scenario and the fallout will be coming down. It’ll probably be some on my roof, but it’ll be spread out on the surface of the ground. So as long as I’m below grade, the stuff that’s spread out on the surface of the ground won’t get to me. This is a basement setting and all around us is either like the concrete foundation and then the ground behind it. So we’re perfectly shielded. The thing we have to worry about is over top because all those dust particles, like you’re saying that were kicked up, dropped onto the roof and they are shooting gamma radiation and that gamma radiation travels how far? It’ll travel about 100 meters or so.

So the stuff on top of your house, they would be irradiating you from the top down. Right. So I have some, you know, asphalt shingles on top of my house. They’ll lock some of them, but not enough. So the space that I would use in my house would be underneath the stairs going into the basement. If I got six hours before I know something’s happening, I can just shovel dirt on top of the stairs to get that extra mass. Let’s say I’m outside, I’m shoveling dirt on top of my stair landing for shielding.

When do I know to stop shoveling and actually going and protecting myself getting into the shelter? And again, that’s where you would rely on your radiation detector to tell you when that fallout is starting to come down. Once the cloud of radioactive dust has arrived, I’m going to be done shoveling, you know, and I’m going to get in my shelter. And how will you know that using that? Like what would that register as on the Geiger counters until later? It would register as a thousand times background. So it would just start going up? Yeah.

A thousand times background is still not a health issue, but it definitely will tell me, hey, the cloud of radiation has arrived. Again, that fallout’s not going to go boof and all be down on the ground in one spot. It’ll come down over some time. So if you miss the first 10 minutes and get a little bit of exposure, it’s okay. So this thing has a 300 hour battery life, runs off two AA batteries. That 300 hours will take you 12 days, I guess, if you wanted to have that running continuously. Yeah, you probably wouldn’t need it.

You need about, I think, four inches of dirt, loose dirt to cut the radiation down by a factor of two. You could use canned food on top of that, it doesn’t matter. You just want to get lots of mass between you and the radioactive material. Won’t those become contaminated by the gamma radiation if you’re using it to shield? The gamma radiation will not make the stuff radioactive. The only way that it’s going to get radioactive is if the radioactive material gets mixed in with the food. What are some other items? Like can you use anything? Anything that’s heavy.

So in my basement, I got filing cabinets, I got a washer and dryer that I can move and cover the two walls that are not covered by the actual basement walls. It’s important to actually be able to measure here where might that be getting radiation in there. Yeah, because there might be certain spots within your shelter that radiation is coming in somehow because there’s not coverage in one spot or another. So you don’t want to be sitting under that spot. Right. And so this gamma radiation that’s in the dust particles, that’s going to linger around for how long? It’s going to be a soup of different radioactive isotopes.

The short-lived ones obviously will decay very fast within hours. Then there are some at the end there that are like cesium has 30-year half-life strontium has whatever, some decades too. So there’s some that’s going to stick around for a long time. But if you can stay away for a day, it will have decayed by a factor of 10. It’s still dangerous, but the most potent is right after. Yeah. A lot of the stuff will have already decayed en route here. So in general, how long do we need to stay down here in our makeshift shelter? Two weeks is a good rule of thumb.

We can probably get away with less up here because we’re some distance away from the bomb and there will be less fallout. And a great useful resource for that is nukeapp.com. And that’ll help you track the potential fallout and visualize how fallout is going to be dispersed after a nuclear incident. And really it’s largely determined by your ability to know how much radiation is there. So therein lies the importance of the Geiger counter. It could be two weeks, it could be four weeks, it could be two days. Right. And in two weeks, you can probably be outside for quite a while.

After a day, you can probably run out and get something that you really, really need in your shelter. In terms of why we shield ourselves against radiation, obviously on one end of the spectrum is acute radiation sickness. On the other end are some more long term chronic health effects. So the more exposure you get in those initial phases, the higher the risk that you’re going to succumb to that acute radiation sickness. That’s why it’s important that for those first days and weeks that you’re super protective and you try to minimize exposure. Exactly.

So we’ve talked about how we can use our Geiger counter when we’re getting prepared to go into the bunker. We’ve talked about how we can use the Geiger counter while we’re in the bunker. Now, let’s say a few days go by and we’re trying to get something or maybe we forgot some medicine. We have to venture out. Shall we go outside and see how it is out there? I would suggest we measure first before we go outside. Okay. How do we measure outside if we’re inside? These things do connect to a smartphone, so you could actually put it on a stick and hold it outside and read on the smartphone if your phone’s still working.

So we get it taped to our duct tape stick. We stick it out. And is it more or less safe, would you say, to a merger? So my magic number is one sievert of exposure that I want to avoid. A sievert is a unit of radiation exposure. What the scintillator reads is in sieverts per hour. A reading of one sievert per hour, that means I can be outside for an hour. If it reads two sieverts per hour, then I can only be outside for half an hour to get that one sievert of exposure.

If it reads four sieverts per hour, 15 minutes. Okay, so we just put that thing on a stick with some duct tape. We took our measurements. It reads two sieverts an hour. That means we have half an hour to get this video done. So let’s go do it. All right. Oh, well, it’s not quite as I remembered it, but so you say we got about a half an hour to make this work. Now, normally, I guess I would be ideally suited up in some kind of suit. Ideally, it’s easier to decontaminate, but it does not help you against the gamma radiation.

Right. It keeps the beta radiation off your skin and keeps the alpha radiation from being trekked around. So if it’s windy out, there’s dust blowing around, sand particles, those will potentially get on my clothes. And if I then go back into the shelter, I’m bringing that stuff back in with me. That’s correct. You want to take it off and you want to check for contamination on your coveralls. This measures surface contamination as well as gamma radiation. When you check in for contamination on your clothing, you can’t just look for gamma radiation because the gamma radiation background all over the place will just flood that number and you won’t be able to discern contamination.

So you’ve got to look for beta, gamma, and decontaminate based on that. So when this device is closed, it’s affecting gamma? Only gamma. When it’s open, it detects alpha, beta, and gamma. Now, let’s say we have to venture out to the woodshed. There’s some little creeks, maybe a garden. Is there anything that we should be paying attention to when we’re in this environment? Is there going to be certain places where the radiation is more intense that we should avoid? Obviously, this is why we were constantly looking at our radiation detector. You probably want to look around your surroundings and there’s a depression where lots of the that’s going to be a place to avoid.

If it’s a rough surface, it’ll probably catch more stuff. Then your cement driver, it might have been washed off by rain already, but you really can’t predict it. One thing when you’re out and about is you want to make sure you don’t get injured. It’s bad to be injured in any case, but if you do have a cut, that’s another place where radiation contamination can get inside your body. So the alphas and the beta particles, you don’t want to ingest those. That’s right. So we also want to have a gas mask if we’re going outside, a respirator.

Ideally, if it’s blowing around and things like that, most of the stuff is going to be on the ground. The gamma radiation is going to be more of a restrictive factor than the inhale stuff that you’re going to be saving. But again, it depends on the situation. If it is dusty, if stuff’s blowing around, yeah, by all means, you do not want to inhale it. But if it’s a nice clear day and you just have to go out and do something, it might be easier just to go and do it. So you’re kind of weighing the two risk factors, the gamma versus alpha, beta.

If the wind is swirling around, it might be in your interest to put on a respirator. If it’s not and it’s calm out and you’re just facing high gamma radiation, that’s when you would want to maybe just scrap the mask. Just go do what you got to do really quick. And do it as quick as possible. So if I have a hazmat suit on, if I wanted to decontaminate it, I could potentially go through the process of hosing it down and things like that. If you have the water. If you have the water. If you have the water pressure.

If you’re outside, you can shake it out. And then still afterward, I would still check it with the meter. What if somebody comes and knocks on your door and they’ve been outside throughout this whole thing and they want to come into the bunker? Not even from the perspective of are they a security risk, but just strictly with whatever radiation they might be contaminated with. Could they bring that into your shelter? I think the amount of radiation that they would have ingested, the gamma radiation that comes from their body onto yours is going to be fairly minimal.

And you know, they might, you know, it’ll be lots for them because they’re going to get all the beta radiation inside of them. You could check them with your Geiger counter and see how radioactive they are. But I don’t think that would be an issue that they’re radioactive. So this device could be used in that situation as a body scanner of sorts to determine if a person’s clothes are hot. They’re straggling out there. They’re a refugee. Clothes are saturated with alpha and beta particles. So we want to know how hot that person is when they come to the shelter.

So you take their clothes off and you could check their body and see. Wouldn’t there be stuff on their skin too? There could be. Most of the stuff will wash off and you can always check, you know, does that body have significant amounts of radiation to what we’re already seeing? To what we’re already experiencing. All right. So we’ve had our first foray out into the post-apocalyptic hellscape. We’ve come back to the shelter. We’ve decontaminated. A couple of weeks have gone by. I think it’s time that we venture out and start doing all the things that we’re going to have to do to ride out the reconstruction of society.

Should we head to the studio? See what’s left? All right, let’s do it. Well, this place held up pretty well. Sucks that I had to hack that guy’s leg off back there for trying to take our food. Anyway, so we made it back to the studio. We got some solar panels powering our backdrop here. Now we have to rebuild. We’re two weeks out. We’re going to start venturing out more frequently. What sort of things should we be looking for? And what sort of uses are we going to have with this Geiker counter? Yeah, again, I’m looking for keeping my exposure to less than a sievert, total exposure, since we started getting into the shelter.

Above that, we’ll see acute radiation effects. Two sieverts we’re looking at, throwing up, things like that. Five, half the people will die. One sievert will also increase my chances of getting cancer by about 5% or so. The Canadian guidelines for emergency response is a quarter of that. We’re in the same ballpark. They just have a little bit more of a safety factor, which would be nice to have if we have the option. Is there still going to be places that are hazardous? Like, what about water? There is going to be still radiation. There could be areas where fallout has accumulated.

Some of the longer-lived radioisotopes, they’re going to be around for 40 years. We still want to manage our gamma radiation exposure. Again, we’ll use the detector to find out where those hot spots are and stay away from them if we can. What about water sources? Could I just go down to a creek? What should a person know if they’re trying to use a natural water source? The water can be contaminated. The best source of water would be a deep well. Worst source of water is the stuff that came off of your roof and ran by all the fallout.

Can you filter that out in any way? You can filter it. You can let it settle. There will be some that are in solution, so you won’t get rid of everything. But again, you can get rid of 99% of it. So a nuclear war survival expert told me once that lots of those isotopes will fall to the bottom of the rivers or fall to that because they’re heavier. Yeah. Is that true? The heavy fallout particles, like the sand particles, yeah, they’re going to be heavier. They’re going to be going to the bottom.

The stuff that came down like this as ash, they’re probably going to be floating around the top, but they might attach themselves to other stuff that’ll settle out easier. So you can settle it and you can filter it. Let’s say I had a nice beautiful garden when this happened. Now it’s been irradiated. Can I eat the fruit on that garden? Was it all going to be dead? Let’s say you had some cucumbers there. If you wash off the cucumbers and tomatoes, you’ve removed the radioactive material that’s settled on it. A year later or whatever, some of the contamination would be still in the soil, could come into your produce.

But again, that would be a very, very small fraction of it. So you’d still have a use case for this, especially around food that’s not in cans or that’s not in your long-term food storage. Is there a bio amplification effect in that if an animal is eating that contaminated stuff and then you eat that animal? Is that something or will animals be contaminated? Animals will be contaminated and it will depend on exactly what radioisotope it was, whether or not it concentrates going up the food chain or dilutes going up the food chain.

So I think things like cesium and strontium, they can amplify going up the food chain. All right, so potassium iodide, what do you know about this stuff? Is it going to be of use? Well, your thyroid gland concentrates iodide. You want to load up your thyroid with non-radioactive iodide so that when the radioactive iodide comes along, your thyroid does not want to absorb it. It doesn’t help protect you against gamma radiation. It is protecting you against ingested radioactive material. And in particular, radioactive iodide. That iodide is a beta emitter. You wouldn’t maybe need this if you were prepared and you got into your shelter right away because you wouldn’t be exposed to alpha beta.

It also doesn’t hurt and there might be some airborne stuff you might still ingest it. So for younger people, it might not be a bad thing just to take it as a prophylactic. For people my age, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. One thing we didn’t talk about was air filtration. So if we’re in a bunker or our makeshift bunker and we don’t have an air filtration system, could these particles be in the air and could we be breathing them in? You know, if you’re where we are, the fallout’s not going to be like the heavy sand and gravel particle.

It’s going to be ash particles that are going to be blowing around and they’re going to get into the air. So air filtration would be a good idea. In my basement, I have a heat recovery ventilator which I could put the filter through and I could pressurize my basement if things are still running. You could probably make something out of like a furnace filter with a fan or something. The same way, same principle because the particles you’re trying to block out are the size of dust. Yeah, they’re the size of ash.

This is why you don’t really need, all you need is a particulate filter to block the potential radioactive particles. You don’t necessarily need something with activated carbon in it. You would need that if there was like gases burning and you were, you know, there’s fires and there was all kinds of chemical pollutants and for that, you would need this. But generally speaking, a particulate filter, you could do something makeshift like that and maybe that’s something that we’ll experiment with. Another use case for this then would be, they say it was winter and it was nuclear winter.

You’re going to be using a lot of firewood. So you’re going to be handling a lot of firewood. If it’s saturated with nuclear fallout, you’ll want to check your wood Yeah, the actual wood would probably not be contaminated, but the bark and whatever the leaves. Right. So we’ve been talking about a scenario in which we’re hundreds of miles removed from the epicenter of the blast. What if you’re closer to the blast and you have a megaton yield city killer go off nearby? What, obviously, I’m assuming that the needs are going to be much higher.

If you’re straight downwind of a 20 megaton ground burst and you’re trying to shield from the fallout from that makeshift shelter inside of an existing basement is probably not going to be enough. You probably want to get more protection factor, better sealing, more material between you and the radioactive material. So that’s essentially a bunker. All right, guys. So if you want more information on all the stuff we’ve been talking about today, I’d encourage everybody to go pick up a copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills.

There’s even a free PDF that’s available online. If you need anything like Geiger counters, hazmat suits, gas masks, potassium iodide, all that stuff, you can get it at CanadianPreparedness.com. Thanks for coming out, man. I greatly appreciate it. And hopefully we helped a few people if the worst case happens. Let’s hope it doesn’t, but I’m not very hopeful at this point in time. Thanks for watching, guys. Take care. Canadian Prepara. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com where you’ll find high-quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks.

Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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