Nukes
You Will Survive Doomsday
By Bruce Beach
Table of Contents
MYTHS
MYTH #14: There would be no dangerous radioactivity after a couple of
years.
After having explained all this, now I must tell you that there are some
isotopes that unfortunately do not fall into either the short range of
initial radiation (which we do not need to worry about because it does
not extend out of the blast area), nor the medium range (that you will
be protected from by a fallout shelter), nor the very long range (that
decays over so many hundreds of years that their energy is too weak to
concern us here).
These remaining isotopes are real meanies. There may be solutions to
the problems they present but there are no simple solutions. There will
not be enough of them around that they will make walking around
dangerous for most people but the problem is that they get into the food
chain and that they have relatively short half-lives, between five and
30 years.
That means that during the next couple of hundred years they are
going to be giving off most of their energy. Fortunately, some of them
are rather rare, and given that they are going to be widely dissipated
in worldwide fallout we can largely ignore their effects.
Others may be concentrated in certain areas, certain types of soil
and certain foods where we can avoid them also.
So they will not be that serious a problem.
Some others, however, particularly Cesium 137 and Strontium 90,
present mayor problems in keeping them out of the food chain.
Even here, there are available defense techniques.
For example lime, gypsum, fertilizer, or organic matter (in practical
amounts) may be applied to low calcium soil, or naturally high calcium
soil may be used for growing certain crops which have an uptake
preference for calcium over strontium.
There are known refining and purification techniques for some foods and milk,
and there are some new techniques which I have discussed with some of the
researchers at some of the leading nuclear laboratories, but which the world
isn't ready to hear about as yet.
These methods along with others such as land denial, deep plowing,
surface scraping, and selective utilization, are harsh realities that
are going to have to be faced by the long-range survivors.
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