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The Fall Out


wendy reakes

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If anyone has any knowledge of the effects of a full scale fall-out on planet earth, I would appreciate some advice.

 

My book (The Perfects) ends in Dec 2012, (per the Mayan Calendar) with mass destruction from nuclear war.

 

I have used the Burlington cold war underground city and modernized it to suit the twenty first century. I have stated that it is fueled by oil, pumped from the ground and that it has its own micro refinery. I've also said that water is taken from a massive underground lake and that the people within the shelter could survive five years after the Apocalypse.

 

My question is...would the water still be pure enough and would it last five years?

 

For my sequel (not written yet), I'd also like the inhabitants to continue living within the city, underground, for longer than that. How many years could I feasibly get away with until their supply of water and fuel dry up?

 

Thanks

Wendy

 

P.S I've attached the link for Burlington in case no ones heard of it. Not many people have.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/underground_city/

 

Aren't there any environmentalists on this environmental forum?

 

Anyone?

 

Thanks for your help on this. Greatly appreciated.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for your help on this. Greatly appreciated.

I can name that rhetoric is eight words: sarcasm! :) Remember what John Knowles said about that! :naughty:

 

Keep in mind hypography is not a professional consulting service, but a recreational community of science enthusiasts. People tend to respond to threads that interest them, rather than plain requests for information, interpretation, and analysis. Quite a few of us are pretty busy with jobs etc, so can’t read or respond to as many threads as we’d like.

 

If anyone has any knowledge of the effects of a full scale fall-out on planet earth, I would appreciate some advice.

Nobody has any high certainty knowledge of the effect of a large scale nuclear war, because there’s never been one. Experience has shown that even well-respected theoretical predictions of the results of precisely quantified events (ie: Sagan's "nuclear winter" prediction, and it's failure to accurately model the effects of the great oil fires of the 1991 Gulf War) are often critically inaccurate, so even experts (which I'm not) tend to be guarded in their predictions.

 

Strictly speaking, radioactive fallout is surface and dissolved dust containing radioisotopes. To get much of it, the nuclear bomb or missile warhead must detonate near the ground, rather than a high altitude “airburst”. Airburst are more destructive of most desired targets, however, and special kinds of nuclear weapons such as enhanced EMP devices designed to damage computer, communication, and electrical equipment and enhanced radiation devices (“neutron bombs”) designed to kill the maximum number of people while minimizing damage to structures may produce practically no fallout. Fallout, therefore, can vary extremely based on the decisions made by those who program the weapons, so predicting its effect isn’t a purely technical question, but also a psychological, sociological, and political one. As these decisions would likely be made by a few military and political leaders, predicting the physical effect of a nuclear war requires one to predict the behavior of some fairly inscrutable individuals.

 

In short, it’s very hard to predict the effect of a full-scale nuclear war.

 

Some nuclear weapons, such as cobalt bombs, are specially designed to produce more dangerous radioactive particles than other of the same direct destructive energy. It’s conventional military wisdom that smaller nuclear countries, such as the UK, have a greater proportion of these in their arsenals, to compensate for their having fewer warheads. This “wisdom”, however, is more rumor than reliable intelligence, as details like these are kept very secret. (There’s a great line in the 1965 movie Doctor Strangelove where the title character points out the oxymoronic nature of keeping a deterrent weapon a secret).

 

The major long-term danger of fallout is having it dissolved in drinking water, as very small amounts of radioactive material can be danger when ingested. There’s nothing too difficult about purifying radioactively contaminated water – a good-quality pressure pumped ceramic filter will remove most of it, and a simple still (boiler and condenser) nearly all of it – but deploying even such simple water treatment solutions for a large population might prove hard to impossible.

 

I don’t mean to seem evasive, but rather to impress on readers that post-nuclear war fiction is inherently very speculative. We know in detail the short, medium, and long-term morbidity and mortality effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but extrapolating from these 2 bombings to a global war involving hundreds or thousands of many times larger warheads and bombs isn’t easy. My intuition is that our cultural assumptions informing such predictions exaggerates its severity – a good thing to encourage, as the belief that a nuclear war would assuredly mean the end of humankind is a strong deterrent to ever having one. This leads a fiction writer to a conundrum – is it morally better to truthfully present as accurate a scientific prediction of the effects of a nuclear war as you can, or an exaggerated one that will reinforce our cultures’ belief that such a war would be so terrible that it should be unthinkable.

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One thing to remember is that the only two cities ever nuked were never abandoned and have been continuously inhabited since the blasts. Nuclear fallout (except for cobalt type bombs) isn't deadly for very long, a few days to weeks depending on several factors like rain fall, height of the blast where you are in the fallout foot print among others, there is really no need to remain in a shelter for years. But to answer your question specifically

My question is...would the water still be pure enough and would it last five years?

 

Yes, depending on how many people and how long you want them to live there. Underground water is usually filtered through many layers of soil and rock and it takes many years for surface water to make it to deep reservoirs, by then most of the radiation would have decayed or been filtered out or both. Growing food would be the major bottle neck IMHO...

 

Chernobyl can be used a very rough guide to what happens when really bad fallout covers the ground, the area around Chernobyl wasn't exactly sterilized, both animals and people still live there and a nuclear reactor melt down releases some stuff that makes bomb fallout look like vitamins...

 

BTW. Ever read Heiros Journey by Sterling Lanier? Great post apocalyptic novel...

 

One more thing, your city is not exactly a secrete, in a real all out nuclear free for all hardened targets like this city would be among the first to go boom boom....

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