Did You Ever Have a Fall-Out Shelter?

Three-Mile Island Now Uses Only One of Its Nuclear-Generating Stations

Did You Ever Have a Fall-Out Shelter?

We never had a fall-out shelter. In fact, I don’t think any of my neighbors in Iowa or Texas in the 1950s and 1960s did, either.

However, I saw them on tv shows. There were public service announcements telling us where to go for public shelters and what the logo identifying them looked like.

And, my mother did explain to me that, if we needed to, we could shelter in the laundry room, the only room in the house with no windows, and the hallway next to it.

She showed me the cans of food neatly arrayed in the cupboards and explained her schedule for rotating the food on a regular basis so it would always be fresh.

The country’s most significant foreign policy was Mutual Assured Destruction between us and the Soviet Union.

Mutual Assured Destruction means we won’t launch a nuclear bomb if you don’t. But, if you do, we will too and nothing will grow on the planet for hundreds of years.

Air Raid Drills

At school, on a regular basis, we heard the air-raid drill and ducked under our desks in practice for possible planes dropping bombs.

President Kennedy advised the building of fall-out shelters in 1961.

As the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 made clear, war was possible.

Those in power had grown to adulthood during the 30 years when we had two wars back-to-back that engaged all the major powers of the world – World War I and World War II.

Public fall-out shelters ended in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Does This Apply to Nuclear Power Accidents?

What was at stake during the Cold War, and the mutually-assured destruction policy, can, perhaps, be understood in light of nuclear power plant accidents since then.

Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl,, and now Fukushima, Japan, after the tsunami, give us information about the possible effects of a nuclear reactor accident and insight into the effects of radiation.

In 1979, the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylania lost nuclear reactor coolant that caused a meltdown and the release of radioactive gases after a combination of mechanical failures and human errors caused by misleading instructions on the equipment.

In response, radioactive wastewater was released into a nearby river; 140,000 pregnant women and pre-school age children were evacuated, and $1 billion was spent on cleanup efforts between 1979 and 1993.

Subsequent studies have found no significant health effects or increased cancer incidents as a result of the accident.

Three-Mile Island was rated 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), on a scale of 1 to 7: Accident with Wider Consequences.

The 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, sent a plume of radioactive material into the air after a power surge during a safety test resulted in an explosion.

345,000 people were moved out of the contaminated area. 64 died as a result of the accident and an estimated 985,000 premature cancer deaths have been reported.

Some say that pressure on the Soviet Union to be more transparent in their control of nuclear power after Chernobyl helped lead to glasnost – openness in the management of their nuclear industry – and eventually, the dismantling of the Soviet Union into individual countries.

Chernobyl is rated 7 on the International Nuclear Event scale: Major Accident

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant melted down and released radioactive materials into the air, ground and water in March, 2011.

Power to their cooling systems was lost due to the disruption of the tsunami. Three other reactors were already shut down for scheduled maintenance or re-fueling

A few plant workers were killed during the earthquake. Six have exceeded the life-time limit of radiation, with 300 more severely exposed

Residents in a 12-mile radius of the plant were evacuated. Food grown within 30 miles of the plant is banned for sale. Future cancer deaths are estimated at 100 to 1,000.

The accident is rated 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, on a scale of 1 to 7: Major Accident.

If you had a fall-out shelter, was it eventually converted to a game room?

Do you still keep a supply of food?

Have your grandchildren ever asked about the yellow-and-black fall-out shelter symbol?

To you and the long, healthy lives of your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers

Click here to nominate my book for Best Grandparenting Book at grandparents.about.com

http://newgrandmas.com

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