Reactor Containment Buildings as Bomb/Fallout Shelters?

Delta Force

Banned
Reactor containment buildings are designed to contain internal pressures of 40 to 80 psi (275 to 550 kPa) and have been proven capable of shrugging off hits from F-4s traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. How well would the containment building fare as a bomb or fallout shelter?

Some of the scenarios would be as a shelter for people who happened to be at or near the site during an air raid or nuclear attack, or an organization taking over the building for use as a hardened fortress (criminals, rebels, etc.). A unit with fuel in or near the reactor probably wouldn't make a very good long term shelter because the fuel would meltdown, but what if the unit had never received fuel, never went critical, or was never completed?
 

pdf27

One problem with using it as a fortress - no protected firing positions. That essentially means that you'll have infantry and then later engineers crawling all over you unless you use the building as a glorified command bunker/sleeping accommodation and dig in around it.

As for a bomb/fallout shelter, the base building would be quite well suited (and would also protect nicely against prompt radiation from nuclear weapons going off nearby), but would need major refitting to be much good. Nuclear reactors aren't well provided with living accommodation, clean water supplies, sanitation, kitchens, etc. Possible but a lot of work - certainly not something you could start doing quickly, COLPRO kits are a lot quicker to set up and almost as good.
 

Delta Force

Banned
pdf27 said:
One problem with using it as a fortress - no protected firing positions. That essentially means that you'll have infantry and then later engineers crawling all over you unless you use the building as a glorified command bunker/sleeping accommodation and dig in around it.

As for a bomb/fallout shelter, the base building would be quite well suited (and would also protect nicely against prompt radiation from nuclear weapons going off nearby), but would need major refitting to be much good. Nuclear reactors aren't well provided with living accommodation, clean water supplies, sanitation, kitchens, etc. Possible but a lot of work - certainly not something you could start doing quickly, COLPRO kits are a lot quicker to set up and almost as good.
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Almost all nuclear reactor sites have access to vast quantities of water due to their cooling needs, so that shouldn't be an issue. They are also large industrial sites where hundreds of people work and so depending on the state on the complex there would likely be kitchens, fire fighting and small medical facilities, etc.
 

pdf27

The problem isn't the kitchens, medical, water etc. not being present, but being in the wrong place. If you're using it as a fallout shelter then you're in an environment where there is a significant gamma/neutron hazard in the outside world (otherwise a COLPRO tent would work just as well). None of those facilities - probably not even a toilet - is inside the containment building, meaning that it isn't habitable. You need to build them all up inside the containment building before it's any use, otherwise people will still have to go outside into the danger area and bring contamination in with them when the come. Cooling water is a good example of this - it'll be massively contaminated, so you need a polishing plant to get it up to safe drinking water standards. That's one of the few things you might actually have on a nuclear site (for the feedwater), but to be any use it needs have a shelter put up over it to keep the product clean and to protect those working on it.

Put simply, a bomb shelter is just a big concrete box that you can shelter in for a short period of time, for which a reactor containment vessel would do admirably and for which you only need the support services nearby. A fallout shelter requires that you be able to stay inside it for considerable periods of time (6 months, potentially) and has all the requirements for living and staying sane present. That's a big enough job that you may as well build from scratch, particularly since fallout shelters don't need to be particularly well hardened - the required protection is easily achieved with a bulldozer and a bit of wriggly tin.
 
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