and no one has really thought of a good way to provide power.

the 90 degree entry is spot on. radiation cant turn a corner easily. plus, worst case, its easy to defend if people try to force their way in.

water storage can be put into a gray tank for reuse. it would be super keen if you could dig a well inside or next to your shelter. again, cheap to maintain and run. plus, the water will be as clean as any youll find provided the water table is deep enough. it would be easy to test as well.

I found your blog by accident by googling NaNoWriMo. Funny you’re thinking about something I’ve been goofing with for years.

FWIW, CT has it about right. :) Read “Nuclear War Survival Skills” by Cresson Kearney. Just about everything you need to separate the facts from the fiction is there. If you need a copy, email me. It’s an eBook in PDF format. Exhaustive, well-informed reading.

A few other thoughts:

1). Use geometry shielding (90 degree angles) to shield your door. Done properly, each 90 degree bend drops the incoming exposure by a factor of 10x. (Ie, one 90 deg bend takes a 300 rad/hr field down to 30 rad/hr). It also tends to break-up the shockwave if you do it right, and makes your door less vulnerable to blast debris and distant small-arms fire.

2). Berm the entire structure. 3 feet of dirt all around and use of 12 inch thick concrete walls give a 1400:1 reduction in absorbed dose for your occupants.

3). Consider using ICF’s (insulated concrete forms… Google it, Reward Wall Systems, Inc) for your wall structures. You can assemble these like Legos, add-in the code-required rebar, and fill them with concrete. The US Army tested a structure made with these against a simulated airburst nuclear device of 150 kt yield at a slant range of 3000 meters. It cracked slightly but did not yield. The simulated occupants survived nicely.

4). Consider the effects of the EMP pulse in your planning. The super-efficient flourescent lamps and LEDS currently in vogue are poor survivors in an EMP event. Add-in some of the basic tried-and-true Edison bulbs as a fall-back.

5). Consider moving the generator room. Decouple it from the main slab and give it it’s own isolated space. Two reasons: a). Noise and vibration. b). Fire resistance. Understand a diesel rig won’t be hurt by indirect blast pressure (just keep the debris from hitting it and keep the overpressure pulse under 20 psi) and it won’t care a bit about ultra-high radiation fields. So this critter can (and should) go into a bermed vault with a concrete cover displaced a few inches around the perimeter for ventilation. You can access this gen-pen from the main living area via a short tunnel with a blast door.

6). If you plan on having self-generated power, you’ll need not only abundant fuel (diesel is ideal)… but a redundant / servicable power system. Design for accessibility and sustainability. Stock spare parts. Know how to trouble-shoot and repair everything quickly. Understand that any “modern” genny will have a brushless head and internal excition. Ditch this complexity for a “cheap” chinese head using a Z-winding feedback-excitation scheme. (You can fix it in less than 10 minutes once you understand how they work, and parts are cheap and universally available).

7). Ventilation is the Achilles Heel of any shelter. Where I live, you couldn’t survive the heat/humidity of such a shelter for more than a few hours. Air movement, or air conditioning, is a requirement. Your current design doesn’t allow much, if any, cross-flow. You might want to work on this aspect.

Looking forward to seeing what you submitted to NaNoWriMo!

so what is your take on the water problem and the security issue?

well my idea for the renewable energy was to raise them from inside the bunker or outside after the blast is over with. maybe wearing the radiation suits i suggested.

This design is mostly a fallout shelter, and less of a bomb shelter. That is, it’s not expected to survive in close proximity to the blast, of course that’d be a bonus but it’s a HUGE engineering challenge. Alpha and beta radiation are blocked very easily, Gamma is the problem that you need a lot of shielding for. 50ft underground is quite expensive, I think as long as your bunker is covered with a few feet of earth it should be fine.

The fallout from a nuclear blast is actually surprisingly short-lived. It should be reasonably safe to go outside after some weeks, say 1-2 months at most.

plus, if you are thinking of making it suitable for 18+ people then i would add more storage room. or if you want it for less then i would remove one of the living quarters to add more room for storage. you have to think, people are going to be living down there for 3-4 months at LEAST. so, to have enough storage for all of them would be nessisary. not including storage for after you leave the area. so basically, you would need tools for rebuilding your homes, ways to farm (if that is even possible) guns and ammo (and lots of them) plus, maybe a second bunker to store a couple vehicles and lots of gas. plus, once you leave the bunker you can’t expect to run into a stockpile of food and water. so that would be needed to plan into also.

remember, if people are outside they will be trying to get in to save their own lives. so camouflage! (or if everyone in your neighborhood knows that you built a bunker that will not be necessary) so then you will need ways to “remove” the people that are trying to get in. i.e. gun ports, mines, and whatever you might think of. because, sooner or later they will get inside, and they might just kill you all. maybe a safe door (like the kind that is in banks, even though they are expensive) maybe you could engineer one on your own. maybe you could make a few bars of steel that could be places into the floor through angled holes that could be wedged into the door or the door frame. that would be helpful also. plus i would think about making the ramp very narrow. so that no one could drive a semi or a forklift or some vehicle into the door.

i see alot of you are worried about radiation getting in. honestly earth is the best defense against radiation. as long as you are at least 50 feet underground then i think you will be ok.

the ramp is really the only way you can bring things easily into the bunker. and still be safe from the first blast.

while i am mentioning these things you might just be thinking $. but, honestly a couple 10,000 dollars isn’t that much when you are thinking about your family and friend’s lives.

Thanks, all, for the suggestions, by the way – keep ‘em coming!

Your entryway needs to be at a right angle to the structure itself.

The design above would funnel the radiation into your shelter.

this is a grate idea… with terrorists looking for russian nukes locked away in old barns and nort koria looking offencive this is brilliant.

i mean locked up with you family is fine if your a loner and some extremly rash.

why not save your friends aswell.

ok sorry about that little intro. for a fallout shelter you need a polt of land where you and all your mates can get to within two to three minuets adverage warning time for a missile. you can build the bunker within a week if threats rise quickly.

list of what i would have:

room up to 36 people to sleep kitchen using hydrogen gas (easy to produce) food for two year max including plants for extra food production enough water for two years plus five stage water filtration toilets showers hydrogen powered genorator sofa’s dinning area wrighting desks air filtration system radio/music player computers (setup network) games room swimming pool heating, coal, oil , gas, hydrogen gym board games books games consoles valubles metals (don’t worry you will not be the only survivers so store cashs as something valuble paper money if worth nothing especiale after an attack)

becuase not everyone you love and care for can fit in because of the buget…

make sure there are more shelters within one hundered meters.

after attack>

send out radio signals after two days. from the air lock send up flares after two weeks every two hours (possible automatic rig)

after six months turn to ground above every two days to eliminate radiation plus flus out with water. one year later plant crops trees ect…

by year two radiation should be gone and resonable food production should be avalible

Also, as far as emergency rations go, don’t choose MRE’s. Instead, pick the longest possible duration to stay (about 3 months), and buy those vaccuum sealed mayday bars (in 1200, and 3600 calorie bars). At 1200 calories per day, everyone would have enough energy to exercise (calisthenics, etc), and the rations come in (I believe) 400 calorie blocks, leaving the option of rationing for longer periods. Another thing… You may want to build a shelter out of reinforced concrete, but look into the reinforcing materials they are beginning to use in San Francisco, to reinforce older brick buildings. It goes on like wallpaper, but actually allows brick structures to be more “flexible”, and “bend” with the force of a blast, or earthquake, without ruining its structural integrity. I used to have the link, but my old computer harddrive died.