I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?
If you are exposed to particulate dust or debris, once you are inside an area that is enclosed, be mindful of everywhere you go and everything you touch, and consider them contaminated. The way radioactive contamination like dust particles are removed from people in places like nuclear power plants is with shaving cream. The way shaving cream expands on the skin lifts hair by design, but also lifts particulates so that they may be rinsed off.
The most dangerous radioactive elements have the shortest half lives. The quantity of particles is still important. Like the elephants foot at Chernobyl is still deadly to a human standing in the same room for only a few minutes due to quantity. However, just after a nuclear mass murder event by a subhuman psychopath, staying away from the earliest byproducts of the nuclear reaction is critical. These are extremely harmful even in the fine dust on the outskirts.
Nuclear technology is our most irresponsible atrocity we lack the time perspective to clearly understand. Imagine if the wars of the crusaders 1000 years ago were causing people to die directly as a result of their weapons, not because of geopolitical fallout. Nuclear is an atrocity for any use because of our incompetent governments, but it is a far greater crime on all future generations for thousands of years to come. History will make us the most despised humans in the entire lineage of the species. This is the only legacy any of us will be remembered for.
How would I know if something is a dangerous byproduct?
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Meaning anything that could fall from the sky or get blown around in the air. The particles themselves are heavier than lead, but ash can act like a parachute, and the massive explosion created enormous heat sending everything upwards into the higher layers of the atmosphere.
Any time you see a mushroom cloud, the expanding top stops when it hits a layer of atmosphere that is the same temperature as the rising column. This is true of volcanic eruptions and enormous bombs. The atmosphere gets colder with height, but only for a limited amount of time before the density is too low. Once the density is low enough with elevation, the temperature goes back up from solar radiation. When a plume is powerful enough to punch through the cold and back out into the hot on the other side, that is what can carry heavy particulates quite a long distance. There are winds across these layers that are different and the winds play a role in keeping the layers divided. Think of it like the way Jupiter looks with the cloud layers but in miniature scale that is not easy for human eyes to see. The entire Earth has a similar wind banding structure in the atmosphere. If you ever see wind diagrams for the southern hemisphere the effect is more clearly seen. The northern is a bit less banded due to continuous landmass heating, the Himalayas, and the shallowness of the Gulf of Mexico causing enormous evaporation with an impact stretching all the way into Europe.
The wind patterns carry the little parachutes with heavy radioactive junk and it settles like dust. So like, when we say sealed inside your home, that means duck tape on every door seal, and nothing that could pull air into or out of the space. The pro hazmat setup is a positive pressure bunker where there is a complex filter or recycled air scrubbing system that maintains a higher pressure inside the enclosure so that any leaks present force material out instead of in.
If the future remembers and hates us for nuclear… Good! Hopefully will they also remeber to be carefull and not dig where the waste gets buried