Even bananas contain a tiny amount of radioactive potassium! And despite those precautions, your body gets hit with some amount of (harmless) radiation every day. When you get your basement checked for radon, you’re protecting your lungs from radiation. When you apply sunblock in July, you’re protecting your skin from solar radiation.

And remember, radiation is something you’re encountering every day. If fallout shelter safety isn’t about depth, what other factors are important?įirst, consider what kind of radiation you’re protecting against. “In theory,' Monteyne said, 'a fallout shelter could be in a glass skyscraper.” While bomb shelters are typically placed underground, a fallout shelter can be just about anywhere, if you’re meeting the right conditions. So to design a fallout shelter is in some ways no different than designing protection against the sun - another form of radiation.” Whereas a fallout shelter is only made to protect from radiation. “The bomb shelter has to protect against more things… blast effects, fire, and things like that. “To answer this question, you kind of have to distinguish between the bomb shelter and the fallout shelter,” Monteyne said.

He told me that Jordan and I are both making a common mistake. He’s also the author of “Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War.” If you’ve seen movies like 10 Cloverfield Lane (which has a terrifying trailer), Blast from the Past (terrifying for very different reasons) or played any of the video games from the popular Fallout franchise, you’d be forgiven for thinking that fallout shelters are, by definition, deep underground bunkers made of concrete and metal.īut then I spoke with David Monteyne, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Calgary in Canada.

Civil defense fallout shelter locations