How many people here have access to a fallout shelter, either in their home or close by? What technology has been released in the past thirty or so years that helps with the creation of a fallout shelter (hopefully on the cheap)? Anyone know of any good resources on how you can build your own fallout shelter at home (preferably in a basement), without smelting lead, or anything expensive? I just bought a house with an unfinished basement, and I thought a good upgrade to do on the house was to "harden" the basement a bit. Since we don't live in any major earthquake, flood, or tornado areas (I live in WY), nuclear fallout would be the next biggest thing above a bad winter storm.

Anyone else try this with a basement and succeed?

I'm interested in this as well. I'd rather not spend a whole lot of money fortifying a basement, but if there is cheap material to make a basement more radiation-resistant, I'm all ears!

I saw a website a while ago that listed the radiation absorbancy of soil- let me try and find it....

I guess only a few percentage of people really have access to those stuffs. It is virtually impossible for most of the people to find a fallout shelter with in a few minutes of a nuclear strike.

I don't think the technology on fallout shelter had improved a great deal except a few material changes.

12-24 inches of soil will help dramatically reduce the radiation's impact on your fallout shelter. Since soil is the cheapest way to protect your shelter, placing sand bags (again, really cheap compared to lead or metal means of protection) on top of the shelter will help you out the most. This can be done in a basement, you just have to have a support for the sand bags, such as cinder blocks to brace the weight of the soil. You could construct a "room" in your basement with these cinder blocks, and then place 24" of soil inside of sand bags on top of the cinder block "room". Bear in mind that you must also block all windows in the basement with this soil shield, otherwise radiation would just penetrate the windows.

A basement would be a great place for a fallout shelter, just make sure that you place soil and cinder blocks in BEFORE there is a radiation or nuclear incident- otherwise the soil would already be contaminated.

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I lived in Switzerland for nearly a decade and all new homes and buildings had a nuclear shelter underneath their house.

Huh, I didn't figure that dirt alone would be able to stop radiation!

My questions is even if we do get into a shelter what would we do for food and water. I am sure that the food and water will have a radiation exposure of more than 200% and how long could we survive even if we managed to live in that situation.

Put your food and water in the fallout shelter, it's what everyone did back in the 50s. That way, you have access to your preps, and you're safe from a fallout situation.