Nukes
You Will Survive Doomsday
By Bruce Beach
Table of Contents
MYTHS
MYTH #06: There would be no dangerous radioactivity after a couple of
weeks.
There is a wide range of misconceptions about what is safe and what is not.
The matter is sufficiently complicated that a person should have professional
advice. However, if there was no doctor going to be available to set
a broken leg I presume you would go ahead and do the best you could.
And if one had to build a bridge to get across a river and there was no
structural engineer around, again I presume one would have a go at it.
Doctor's would like to have their x-ray machines available when setting a leg,
and engineers would like to have their surveying equipment, specification
guides, and computers or slide rules when they are building a bridge.
So you can well imagine a radiological defense officer would like to have
radiation detection equipment available when giving advice in a radiation
defense situation.
However, if the advise, expertise, or equipment, is not available,
one must go on. One rule of thumb is that if there is not enough
fallout that you can see it, then there is not enough of it that it will
kill you. Fallout is usually small grain dust or grit, often having a light
color, but not always. It depends upon its source. The best place to
spot it is on a smooth surface, like the hood of a car.
The more dense fallout is, probably the greater the hazard, although
there isn't necessarily a direct correlation. It may fall thick enough
that quite a little heap of it may be brushed up from a surface that is
one foot square. It is possible to build, from common materials found
around the home, an expedient radiation detection meter. The details
for such a meter are found in books listed in the
bibliography.
Even if one has commercially available radiation detection equipment
there is still some considerable skill required in its use. For
example, almost all survey equipment is designed to be used by an adult
of normal stature. This means that if the equipment is held in the hand
of a walking adult it will tell how much radiation is being received 3 1/2
feet above the ground, and particularly by the adults vital organs
which are above that level. A child's or an infant's vital organs will
be below that level and will be exposed to much more hazardous levels
than an adult's. For this reason, if one is passing through an area
that is suspected to have any radiation at all, a child should be
carried on an adult's shoulders.
There is another rule of thumb that for every seven fold increase in
time radioactivity will decrease by ten fold. This is called the
seven/ten rule. This is based upon standard decay. It is useful as an
example, for training, and in building theoretical models, but in actual
practice the decay rate is likely to be something quite different.
It is determined by the isotopic composition of the matter under
consideration.
There is another commonly held misconception among semi-trained
individuals that low levels of radiation cannot be rapidly fatal.
Someone, after several days in the confines of a cramped expedient shelter,
might conclude that because their meters now indicate a very low level
of radioactivity (or perhaps no radioactivity if it is a high-range
instrument), that it would now be all right to go outside and sleep on
the ground in the cool breezes beneath the bright summer stars.
The fallacy again arises from taking measurements at a level that assumes
the vital organs are well above the radiation source. This is not the case
when a person is stretched out on the ground for long hours of sleep.
These long hours of low level radiation exposure to the vital
organs will result in a fatality in just a few days.
Likewise, perfectly healthy adults who take infants out of the
cramped, unpleasant, expedient shelter to allow them to play during the
day on a blanket spread out on the ground will be quite shocked to see
those infants sicken and die in just a few days while they themselves
remain healthy. The infant's vital organs again being close to the weak
radiation source for a long period while the adults' vital organs are
being protected by distance.
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