How to explore a radioactive wasteland with mostly low tech equipment?

Question

I'm writing a story based on people trapped in a city which has had multiple nuclear bombs set off in it, and so has some very irradiated reason. The people in it have slightly more advanced than modern day earth scientific knowledge so they know about radiation, but lack a reasonable supply chain to build more advanced technology items that function in the city like kevlar suits or computers.

They have ample materials and supplies available as would be common in a modern city that got nuked, along with a wide array of common animals around, but don't have a worldwide supply chain to source rare plants and animals from. How would they go into radioactive areas to explore?

Their supply situation is unstable, so waiting it out isn't a reasonable location, and radioactive areas often contain valuable supplies or link to key parts of the city, hence why they were nuked.

Existing questions on this matter have mostly focused on radiation being fine and not being an issue, which isn't true here due to widespead recent use of nukes, or on sourcing rare and exotic plants.

Ideal answers will help explain the sort of society and adaptions you could take to minimize the risk of going into nuked areas, and won't assume extremely rare supplies or advanced technology.

Answer 1

Whenever they go out exploring they would need to wear some full body suit, breathing mask included, to prevent accumulating radioactive dust on themselves.

Together with that they should enforce a strong separation between what's worn in the outside (potentially radioactive environment) and what is worn inside (safe environment).

If they have a supply of running water, upon reentry they would fully strip down of all the clothes, wash their body and then wear inside clothes, while whatever needs to be carried in from the outside would be at least washed with water to remove as much as possible of the radioactive dust. Then, if checking with a Geiger counter would not trip off an alarm, the item and the person would be allowed inside.

The outside clothes would be probably washed and reused.

For filtering the air, I guess that a centrifugal filter, muscle powered, can be the most simple solution, lacking anything else more complex. Again the goal is to remove as much as possible of the potentially radioactive dust.

Answer 2

Others have covered the necessity of keeping radioactive dust off of and out of the explorers. I will only add that KN95 masks and other specialized filter masks used for commercial, non-medical applications (construction, painting, etc.) seem likely to be the highest availability for creating jury rigged fallout protection gear in your hypothetical scenario.

In terms of radiation detection, it's probable that national or local law enforcement offices and airports will have basic instruments for detecting radiation along with some level of training in their use. Beyond that, IIRC, some mineral collectors ("rockhounds") use radiation detectors as part of their hobby, so a few can possibly be supplied by them. As an option of last resort, scintillator crystals may be found in high schools for demonstrating radioactivity to students from which instruments may be jury rigged.

Answer 3

Several good answers address the gear considerations.

Some considerations around who to send:

• Older is better than younger. Lifetime radiation dose is more of a problem earlier on in life than much later in life.

• Sterile is better than fertile. Getting a big radiation dose is more of a problem for the breeders and their offspring. Conveniently, this dovetails into the first consideration nicely.

• More-experienced is better than less-experienced. All other things being equal, it's probably less of a problem to send out people who remember life before the Vault, compared to people who have never seen the sky.

All of that adds up to your wasteland raiders being a gang of raging grannies, which surely we can all get behind.

Answer 4

Preliminaries

The irradiation danger depends on the energy of the bombs, their make up and the altitude of explosion

For a 15-20kt range, uranium/plutonium A-bomb (like the Hiroshima/Nagasaki), exploding at 500m:

• the area of total destruction is about 2km, you have no reason to get there, unlikely that something that one needs survived intact
• the "hot area" for about 1mo has a radius of about 5km
• the fallout is minimally dangerous due to the high altitude of explosion (soil, water and burnt matter will get sucked in the nuke mushroom's stem and will form a black rain, but the contamination doesn't seem lethal)

The neutron bomb design chooses too maximize the radiation damage and lower the blast one. Neutron and γ-ray bombardment doesn't create appreciable amounts of induced radioactivity over times longer than a few days.

For ground level explosions and higher energies - YMMV, but the "a city which has had multiple nuclear bombs set off" and the existence of "radioactive areas to explore" suggest the city is not leveled up by nukes, thus it's unlikely that under/ground level or very powerful explosions were used. Furthermore "key parts of the city, hence why they were nuked" suggest tactical nukes in the kiloton range... ummm... about the same as Hiroshima/Nagasaki

Some data

Rediscovery of an old article reporting that the area around the epicenter in Hiroshima was heavily contaminated with residual radiation, indicating that exposure doses of A-bomb survivors were largely underestimated

Table 6 summarizes the results of the survey of non-hibakusha who were entrants. Of these 525 non-hibakusha, 230 (43.8%) showed disorders. These non-hibakusha consisted of 405 ordinary people and 120 firefighters from Asa-Machi, north of Hiroshima City. The firefighters entered Hiroshima City at 8 a.m. on 7 and 8 August 1945, and they were engaged in rescue of hibakusha and the maintenance of roads. They finished their work at 4 p.m. Their working areas were from Yokokawa Machi (1.5 km north of the epicenter) to the epicenter to Yamaguchi Machi (1.0 km south of the epicenter). They worked for 2 days, but some worked for more than 5 days to search for lost persons and on other duties around the epicenter. They did not drink river water, because countless bodies were floating on the rivers. One to five days after returning home, a lot of the firefighters suffered from fever, diarrhea, sticky bloody stools, bleeding from the mucous membrane of the skin, loss of hair, and generalized weakness. These symptoms are the same as those of the A-bomb radiation sickness from which the hibakusha suffered. The proportion of symptoms was high in those who entered the central area within the 20 days after the blast. The proportion was extremely low in those who entered the area after 1 month. Among the 525 non-hibakusha, 26.4% got a fever (this was severe and lasted for more than 3 weeks for 10.3%, i.e. approximately two-fifths of the fever patients’, so there is no ambiguity), 30.8% suffered from acute diarrhea, and 11.6% complained of high temperature and sticky bloody stools, as if they were dysentery patients. Several days to 3–4 months were needed to get rid of the symptoms. Fortunately, no victims were found in entrant non-hibakusha including firefighters.

Conclusions

• you aren't likely to find anything of value in 1.5-2 km radius, so don't get there
• if it's critical for the survival of the community, many may chose to make the sacrifice and go unprotected within a 5km radius from the epicenter in the next days of the explosion. Some of the will possibly die, others will get 3-4 weeks of acute radiation disease and recover, with some increased risk of cancer down the line
• few days after the explosions, decently closed suits and N95 masks may be all that's necessary as PPE, *iff decontamination countermeasures are followed on return (get them moist to fix the dust, strip them down, take a shower and wash them)
• 3 weeks to a month after the explosion, it may be a bit risky to venture in the zone, but the chances of dying soon or suffer greatly later are probably much less than the chances of dying from the lack of the supplies they seek.

Answer 5

Keep the radioactive dust out of your food and water, and especially out of the air your breathe.

Even a simple wetted-cloth facemask will filter out 99%+ of the bad stuff.

Wear gloves, longsleeve clothing, head cover, goggles. Again, the purpose is to make radioactive dust settle on the clothing, which can be discarded, rather than on your skin. At every known safe opportunity, cleanse yourself and your equipment.

Avoid the bad hot-spots.
To detect the bad hotspots, you need a radiation detector.

Possible options:

• Pilfer a preexisting Geiger counter. They are way more common than you might think. Right now, there are at least hundreds and possibly thousands of them in your home city, assuming you live in a large metro. You can get a crappy but functional one from Amazon for $50, so you can imagine just how many households have one "just in case"

• Build yourself a gold-leaf electroscope. This uses less-than-medieval tech to make, with the knowledge you could have made one in ancient Sumeria of 4000BC
  These only detect alpha and beta radiation, and require careful handling to not mechanically reset by accident.

• If you are willing to limit your exploration to darker hours, a scintillation detector would work even better. Without electronic amplification these are very dim, but they detect x-ray and gamma rays too.

If you absolutely must enter high radiation zones, use clothing with lead foil sewn into it. Lead is very easy to form into sheets of arbitrary thickness, is soft enough to be sewn into/onto clothing, and flexible enough to provide full coverage of joints. A 3mm covering over your clothing (weighing 20kg for a large man) will provide the ability to reduce incoming gamma radiation by a factor of 8 and completely block Alpha and Beta rays. A 6mm coating (at a very painful 40kg) will reduce gamma radiation by a factor 64.

But really, that air filter is by far the most important item. If you allow radioactive dust to settle in your lungs, there is no ways to wash it off. You breathe it in, and it is with you of the rest of your life. (which is not likely to be very long)

Answer 6

Stay Up High

In a post-nuclear-apocalypse city, there will be (remnants of) skyscrapers and other tall buildings. These become your highways. The big radiological concern is avoiding places where contamination (radioactive dust, basically) will collect.

Contamination is more likely to collect in a depression, or a low space with limited outflow. So the subway is probably... not a good place to be. But tall buildings with broken windows are going to experience high winds, rain penetration, etc. There will probably be less contamination there.

So your society will build rickety, terrifying bridges between the shattered husks of the skyscrapers. For safety.

Source Food Carefully

Many plants are highly tolerate of radioactively. Likewise, many game animals are short lived, so their cancer risks are relatively low. This means that wild plants and animals should be highly suspect. Feral pigs are going to move into your city, but you probably don't want to eat them, since they could ingest contaminated material.

You could, however, capture wild animals and raise them in environments you identify as being low in contamination - so think less hunter, more herdsman.

Fuel and Indoor Air Quality

Cooking and heating fuel impacts both your food and your interior air quality. Sources upwind of the blast zones would be best, and you might invest in building a rocket stove for every home - smoke is vented directly outside, and you can cook on the top of it.

To avoid contaminated smoke while foraging - avoid traveling in winter / bad weather, and bring dry rations so you can avoid smoke exposure altogether.

Exposure Maps

If you can get your hands on or construct a Geiger counter, your explorers will probably map out the areas of high and low radiation near their homes. These will shift over time, but everyone will probably have a good idea of the safe zones based on repeated excursions mapping the radiation environment.

Answer 7

How dystopian do you want your story to be? If it's an environment with harsh penalties for crime then you have a instant source of candidates to send into the radioactive wasteland. What would make these people go into these places knowing it's going to be a death sentence? Use their families as leverage.

This way, the technology they have available doesn't need to be fantastic. The characters in the story just need to be desperate enough to set up a system that has no qualms pushing people out into the radiation "for the greater good".