In case of nuclear warfare, can people survive in a subway? If yes, for how long, and if no, why not?

Question

Any answer will be appreciated. Presume that people took inside everything they needed for survival. Animals, seeds, water filters, generators, weapons and everything else needed.

Answer 1

probably but not long since the radiation will eventually kill you especiaally if your within 50 miles of the explosion. the radiation has to be stopped by alot of lead.

you would probab;y survive a weekto a month. puking blood and other freeky paniful xxxx

Answer 2

You may survive if the subway is in New York when the bomb hits Los Angeles. When the bomb explodes it burns up all the oxygen. Then the air rushes back in to the vacuum created causing a second explosion, so to speak. The radiation fallout, if you a close enough to feel any of that, will give you radiation poisoning that will kill you within two weeks.

Answer 3

If they had air filters and a place to dispose of the air and water filters that didn't contaminate the subway, probably on order of a couple of years.  

Both air and water filters would become highly radioactive over a relatively short time, and need to be changed.  They couldn't be thrown away in the subway, so they would have to be taken out or disposed of far outside the nominally clean zone in the subway.  This means that the people who changed filters would get exposed to some pretty high radiation levels, even if they wore suits.  The accumulated dose would be fairly hard on them.  (The life expectancy of the plant operators who cleaned up at Chernobyl was not good afterwards.)  (And a lot of the radioactive stuff in the water is in the form of dissolved radioactive ions, which means you need ion-exchange beds, in addition to particulate filters.  Regenerating those after they become radioactive would be an adventure.)

Also, over time the plumbing and ducting attached to the filter holders would itself become radioactive and have to be changed periodically.  Assuming that a group would have the resources to do this for the decades it would take for the longest-lived radionuclides to decay is far-fetched.  

It takes 6 kgs of vegetable protein to make 1 kg of animal protein (roughly) and to assume they would have the excess grain production to feed livestock isn't realistic.  This is aside from the problem of what to do with all the manure (no, you can't just turn it all back into fertilizer and at some point the phosphate and nitrate you brought down for growing plants will run out which will also limit food production).  

So that is why I think that a very well-equipped and well-trained group might be able to make it for a couple of years.  After that, intragroup enmity, sickness/disease, and resource limitation would take their toll.  

Bomb shelters were a cold-war civil defense pipe dream meant to give people reassurance that they could survive when in fact they would have been as effective as sitting around a campfire singing "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" as the bombs burst.

Answer 4

They'd still need someone on the outside to occaisionally turn on pumps to keep water out of the tunnels (depending on where subway is located.) Also Those tunnels are too well ventilated and exposed to keep all the radiation out. The tunnels also need maintenance to stay tunnels. It might be a good place to ride out the initial blast but Cheyenne mountain is probably the only place that would have everything you need. Get out of the radiation zone. Read up on the Chernobyl site today. Its being repopulated by all sorts of wildlife and plants. Very Fascinating. Not dangerous nearly as long as they thought.

Answer 5

I hardly believe that somoane survive the blast at least 200 miles arround.

Answer 6

There may be some subway tunnels which are deep and remote enough to avoid radiation contamination and blast but, for how long?

How would you get continuous fresh water, how would you get plants to grow without sunlight?

How would you prevent your water supply from becoming radioactive?

If you really want an answer-try living in a NYC subway for even a day. Then to question becomes not whether  you could survive but why would you want to.