• barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Get a respirator if you're actually worried about it, they're not a big deal. I've had to sleep wearing a respirator once and while it wasn't particularly comfortable, it worked. IIRC most fallout is particles (as opposed to gaseous) so you'd probably get decent protection with just normal P100 filters.

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This was assuming enough distance that you're not in immediate danger of acute radiation poisoning, but true. Assuming you can get to some sort of shelter with minimal airflow from outside, you can strip off contaminated clothes and wash potentially exposed skin to get rid of most of it. Think of it as invisible dirt.

      • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm no nuclear medicine expert but i'm pretty sure fallout touching your skin is like 100x less bad than inhaling or ingesting it in any way

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Nope. That's not how fallout works. Most radioactive fallout is going to be squirting out alpha particles. They've got plenty of energy, but very little mass. You can stop most alpha particles with nothing more than a sheet of paper. Having them on your skin isn't good, but as long as you wash them off your cancer risk isn't going up that much.

        The real danger is inhaling or ingesting fallout. Fallout on your body is at most going to irradiate some skin cells and those skin cells are going to get shed soon anyway. But if a bit of radioactive material gets inside your body then every decay particle it shoots out has a good chance of shredding some DNA in a cell and causing a mutation, and it'll keep doing that as long as it's in your body until it decays in to something stable or get's excreted.

        Some radioactive isotopes from nukes are bioaccumulative - You eat them, they'll get stored in tissues for a long time emitting radiation and potentially creating cancer cells all along. The reason people are supposed to take iodine tablets after a nuke detonates is to flood your system with far more iodine than your body needs. Your thyroid will take up as much iodine as it can, then flush the rest. If you're then exposed to radioactive iodine, which is a common radioactive isotope from a nuke detonation, instead of your thyroid taking up and storing that idiodine it'll get passed through your system. Preemptively saturating your system with iodine greatly reduces your chance of getting thyroid cancer.

        The biggest thing with a nuclear detonation, if you're not fried or burned up when every gas line in the city is ignited, is to get out from under the fallout plume. The fallout will be carried by the prevailing winds. If you're under the plume mover perpendicular to it until you're out of it then keep going. If you're not under it move away, preferably up-hill so you can get uncontaminated water.

        After a few days all the really dirty, heavy particles will have fallen out of the plume, so the important thing becomes avoiding drinking contaminated water, eating contaminated food, kicking up and breathing in contaminated dust.

        If all you have is a bandana or rag soaked in clean water that's still better than just raw-dogging the fallout.

        The main killer for a nuke is the blast wave knocking over buildings and causing massive, city wide fires when all the gas lines cook off. Close to the center of the detonating people will get fired directly by the massively powerful burst of heat and x-rays, but that falls off pretty quickly bc square/cube law. Acute radiation poisoning is still a factor for quite a ways, but modern buildings will soak up a lot of the x-ray burst, protecting people inside from acute radiation damage. That won't help them, though because the blast wave of super heated air will hit like a force 5 hurricane and collapse almost all modern residential buildings and a lot of commercial buildings. And if it doesn't get them on the way out it'll get them on the way in as air rushes in to fill the vast vacuum caused by the detonation. So you get hit twice. and then everything catches fire bc gas lines.

        So if nuke - Get a respirator, get as much clean water as you can, put on a rain coat or trash bags or whatever to keep fallout off your skin, and fuck off directly away from the mushroom cloud and the fallout plume. Don't eat or drink anything that's not in a sealed container, and then... uh... in any civilized country I'd say wait for government help but that's not going to happen in America so you can do whatever makes you feel good at that point.