Three background radiation counts

What is the approximate background radiation level in my part of the country (northern Ohio) in these three timelines:
1) 2016 OTL
2) 2016 Vespucci's Cuban Missile War of 1962
3) 2016 Protect & Survive WWIII in 1984
 
What is the approximate background radiation level in my part of the country (northern Ohio) in these three timelines:
1) 2016 OTL
2) 2016 Vespucci's Cuban Missile War of 1962
3) 2016 Protect & Survive WWIII in 1984

On Cuban Missile War scenario background radiation in Northern Ohio is probably pretty same as in OTL on 2016. Missiles didn't on this poin so radioactive and it is bit questionable could Soviet missiles even reach this area and how effective these are.
 

Asami

Banned
As for Protect and Survive; probably still a little cancerous; the bombs dropped 32 years ago and I dunno if that's long enough to disperse some of that radiation.

But then again, I'm taking it all from Fallout, which has radioactive craters 200+ years after the bombs. :p
 
Where, exactly, in northern Ohio? This won't matter for (1) and (2) which should be more or less the same. But it might matter for (3) if a nuclear power plant is hit. In northern Ohio, Perry (40 mi NE of Cleveland), Davis-Besse (30 mi E of Toledo) and Monroe (SE Michigan, 20 miles north of Toledo) would be possible problems. While a hit by a nuclear weapon is not directly analogous to the 1986 Chernobyl incident, it is notable that there is still sufficient radiation in and around the Chernobyl site to justify the maintenance of an exclusion zone.

While I would expect somewhat higher levels of background radiation under a 1984 P&S event anyway given that at least Toledo and Detroit would have been hit (IIRC Cleveland was somehow spared), a hit at one of these nuclear facilities should, if Chernobyl is any indication, create some significant residual radiation problems. For background on radiation now around the Chernobyl site, this page is helpful: http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/
 
Don't want much do you? Working out the fallout patterns from an attack took a large number of people running multiple scenarios back in the day, and then you have to apply decay curves for 50-odd isotopes and then make a bunch of assumptions about sources of food and water and then work out the effects on various organs. Remember that background radiation levels mean very little - what counts is the biological dose, and that is dependent both on the isotope and how it is absorbed. Even then, the biological dose doesn't translate very clearly into health effects - the linear no-threshold model is based on very little data indeed, with the low level dose effects being based on pure guesswork.
 
fallout2.gif


For more detail http://www.futurerevealed.com/maps/images2/fallout2.gif
 
Wow, that's weird...the Cleveland area (my current local) is low, and even Toledo area (my future local) is not very high.

While a good reference I wouldn't put too much confidence in it. It's from FEMA planning at the end of the cold war. However, they still have a "high" fallout zone in SE New Mexico - the only thing I can imagine needing that many groundburst are the Atlas-F silos there had been decommissioned decades prior.

As pdf27 points out it's hard to predict accurately as it's going to be dependent on the weather at the time of the attack. If the winds are right, Cleveland could see a lot of the initial fallout from the Minuteman fields at Whiteman (MO).
 
While a good reference I wouldn't put too much confidence in it. It's from FEMA planning at the end of the cold war. However, they still have a "high" fallout zone in SE New Mexico - the only thing I can imagine needing that many groundburst are the Atlas-F silos there had been decommissioned decades prior.

isn't that the area where the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories facilities are?

for otl levels:
http://radiationnetwork.com/
 
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