Radiation After the War

Delbert

Delbert

Vault-Tec Employee
What has began to bug me is that there is a lot more radiation than what seems realistic in some areas of the wastes, given the time after the war and the setting.

Look at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, look at A-bomb test sites. Are they still reeking with deadly radiation?

No.

I'm not a nuclear physicist, so if someone has a good explanation for this, I'd be happy to hear (read) it.

I do understand that some areas were attacked more than others.
 
Well, we're not using A-bombs or fat mans. We're talking about missiles, and a radiation powere society. Power stations would be targeted, venting out radiation.
 
Yea, I do not think they ever explained the yields that devastated the planet.

I am going to assume we are talking about yields vastly greater than what we saw from WW2.

http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20

Here's a site that allows you to choose your nuke yield and hypothetically drop it somewhere. It might help you understand the damage as I am no physicist either.
 
In Uranium fission, all but 7 fission byproducts decay pretty quickly. 55% of byproducts decay with a half-life of less than one year, about 2.5% have half-lives of a couple of years, 12.5% have half-lives between a decade and a century, about 6% have half-lives measured in (tens or hundreds of) thousands of years, and the remaining 13.5% have half-lives measured in millions of years.

So realistically you will have lost a significant portion of the radiation within a few decades (as those long-lived byproducts don't emit very often.) Of the long-lived byproducts the one you'd worry the most about is Iodine-129, since it's mobile in the environment (by contrast Palladium-107 just sits there.)
 
Dr Fallout said:
Well, we're not using A-bombs or fat mans. We're talking about missiles, and a radiation powere society. Power stations would be targeted, venting out radiation.
Click to expand...

I believe it states in the Fallout Bible that the nuclear weapons of 2077 were roughly equivalent to early 1950's atomic bombs in terms of yield.
 
Dr Fallout said:
It's confirmed, ghouls are a mix of radiation and FEV.
Click to expand...

Later on in the Fallout Bible Avellone changes his mind on this. It was a hot topic back in the day, that there was so much scrutiny applied to "there really shouldn't be FEV all over" back in the day is part of why its inclusion in Fallout 3 was so galling.
 
PossibleCabbage said:
Dr Fallout said:
It's confirmed, ghouls are a mix of radiation and FEV.
Click to expand...

Later on in the Fallout Bible Avellone changes his mind on this. It was a hot topic back in the day, that there was so much scrutiny applied to "there really shouldn't be FEV all over" back in the day is part of why its inclusion in Fallout 3 was so galling.
Click to expand...

Avellone was flying by the seat of his pants on a lot of that stuff, some stuff can be changed without issue. FEV not only being in one place makes more sense for an experimental thing for me anyway.
 
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