It's a lovely, red-hot summer day. Not a cloud in the sky... Except one and it looks like
a mushroom.
It's a nuke and it's going off, big time. The fireball and your life flash before your
eyes. In that split second you remember the disappointment of
Indiana Jones and the The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Nuking the fridge.
Hell, it worked for Indy, so it might work for you. Right?
There's no time to think about it. You dive into your temporary home and wait it out,
with only a mouldy piece of cheese to keep you company.
What are your chances of survival? Pretty low if you eat that cheese. As for the nuclear
blast, I'll let Indy’s creator,
So does his argument hold any weight? Is surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge less science fact
and just more of Lucas’ trademark science fiction?
I’m Stu, this is Debunked and we’re here to sort the truth from the myths, and the
facts from the misconceptions.
This video is made possible with the support of The Great Courses Plus, an on-demand learning
resource with courses lead by the world’s greatest professors.
Okay, since Indiana has provided us with a nice example, we’ll use his scenario to
base our argument around.
First things first. How powerful is the bomb we’re talking about here? Well, the film
is set in 1957 and depicts an American nuclear test. This would coincide with the real-life
Operation Plumbbob,which saw the US drop 29 bombs in the Nevada desert in order to study
their effects.
One bomb in particular, codenamed Smoky, seems a good candidate as it was mounted on a tower,
like the bomb in the movie. Smoky wasn’t exactly a small nuke either. It had a yield
of 44 kilotons.
For reference, that’s about 3 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and twice
that which landed on Nagasaki in World War Two.
In our hypothetical scenario anything within 360 meters of ground zero is getting incinerated
by a huge fireball.
I’m not sure there’s a fridge on Earth that can keep its contents ice cool in the
face of temperatures reaching millions of degrees celsius.
Imagine climbing into a fridge and then hurling it directly into the Sun, it’s not likely
to go well.
But maybe a refrigerator could prove handy when dealing with the other pesky elements
of a nuclear blast. Namely, the shockwave and the radiation.
Now, there is evidence to suggest that such an appliance could survive in such trying
conditions. Back in 1955, another American test called Operation Cue saw the US government
build an entire model village, similar to the one in Indy 4, optimistically named Survival
Town.
Interestingly for us, one concrete house, located 1.4km away from the centre of the
blast, had a big chest freezer in it,
which was packed with food rather than archaeologists. It’s a bit more spacious than Indy’s fridge
and would have been a lot cooler but, as a real-life point of reference, it’s not a
million miles away.
After the test was complete and a fair chunk of Survival Town was blown to kingdom come,
remarkably the freezer was still there in the house.
According to the official report:
Essentially it was fine.
However, before you go jumping into fridges or freezers when the apocalypse arrives, we
need to take a closer look at what happened down in old Survival Town.
For a start, the bomb dropped that day was noticeably less powerful than the one we proposed
in our scenario. The Operation Cue nuke was 29 kilotons,
which would have produced a fireball reaching 300 meters from the centre.
The most intense part of the shockwave from such a detonation would have only stretched
as far as 0.67km. Within this zone, the additional pressure, otherwise known as overpressure,
from the blast would be enough to destroy most buildings and there’d be hurricane
force winds. We’re talking around 500 miles per hour (800 KPH) and fatalities would approach
100%. Collapsing roofs and flying debris --- do have a tendency to cause casualties. Even
heavily built concrete buildings would likely be demolished or severely damaged.
So why did the freezer survive on this occasion?
There are two key factors here . The overpressure caused by the shockwave, which is measured
in Pounds Per Square Inch and is anything above normal atmospheric pressure, would have
likely dissipated at 1.4km, going from 20 psi to around 5 psi or lower at this point.
Even with such a substantial drop, wind speeds would have been 260kph and damage would be
significant with most residential buildings tumbling down,. However, there is a chance
that solid concrete buildings would survive in this area of the shockwave.
And this is exactly what happened to our freezer in Survival Town. There were 5 different types
of houses and the freezer was placed in “SOUNDBITE” It was one of only two buildings that weren't
demolished at the 1.4km range. This was one lucky freezer.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that from 3psi of overpressure and below, wind speeds
would peak at 160kph and, while serious injuries might be common, the risk of dying is reduced.
Diving into the freezer at Survival Town probably wouldn’t have made much difference to your
chances of survival because it was already a reasonable distance from the blast and snugly
inside a concrete house.
Going back to our original scenario, a 44 kiloton nuke would produce a 20psi shockwave
up to 0.77 km away from ground zero, with the smaller but still deadly 5psi shockwave
stretching up to 1.62 km from the centre of the blast.
Jumping in a fridge here really won’t help you, unless you want to be buried in a refrigerator.
You’d be battered to death inside as it was carried along by the shockwave.
But let's be positive. Let's say you jump in a fridge, the building you're in gets obliterated
but the fridge doesn't fall over trapping you inside. Even then, you'd be stuck in the
middle of a nuclear blast area with radioactive fallout reigning down courtesy of a mushroom
cloud.
How long are you going to have to stay inside? Let me put it this way, within an hour, the
radioactive fallout will have decayed by 50% and within 24 hours you're looking at 80%.
Hell, after a fortnight 99% of that annoying radioactivity will be gone.
Aside from the fact that there probably wouldn't be enough food and water inside your fridge
to last two weeks, there's also the troublesome supply of air to worry about. Assuming you
have an airtight seal, you'd only have a few hours of oxygen before you suffocated to death.
The smaller you are or the bigger the fridge you're in, the more time you'd have, but either
way, eventually, you'd have to step out into nuclear fallout that was still dangerous.
That puts you at risk of acute radiation sickness and potential death.
For those of you wondering what would happen to Indy? Well, his airborne escapes inside
the fridge wouldn’t have taken place according to Molecular Biologist Dr. David Shechner.
Estimating that Indy was 0.6km away from the blast, Shechner claims the force required
to lift the fridge and accelerate it to the speeds shown in the movie wouldn’t have
lifted it at all. Instead it would have crushed it, and then some.
The pressure would have been “47 TIMES GREATER THAN THE PRESSURE REQUIRED TO LIBERATE A RAILWAY
CAR FROM ITS TRACK AND CRUSH IT”. So a tiny fridge had no chance.
Right, so getting into a fridge has just killed Indy and hasn’t really helped you deal with
the massive shockwave either. But what about offering some protection from radiation?
Well, our freezer in Survival Town certainly did the trick. The report noted
and went on to conclude that:
The freezer would definitely have been inside the radiation radius of the bomb, which would
have reached 1.5km from the detonation point. For our larger bomb, Smoky, that radius would
have been 1.6km, so from this point on we’ll treat them both the same to keep things simple.
Anyone caught inside this zone would be in serious trouble. We’re talking death rates
of 50% at best, 90% at worst. If you were lucky you might die in a few hours, others
could linger on for weeks.
But if the freezer kept the food safe, then maybe you think the lead-lined fridge would
have done the same for Indiana Jones? Think again.
A 2016 entry in the Journal of Physics Special Topics, titled ‘Indiana Jones and the Fridge
to Freedom’ calculated that the lead-lining would have been too thin to protect him.
To make matters worse for Indy, a nuclear bomb the size of Smoky would actually require
5.74cm of lead to provide a safe level of shielding. These days lead-lined fridges are
generally used to store radiopharmaceuticals, and other radioactive material, but even they
only tend to have a lead lining around 0.3 cm thick. So nope, jumping in the fridge wouldn’t
have saved his cells from an unhealthy dose of radiation.
Now I know what you’re all thinking? How come the food in the freezer was okay then?
Well, I don’t know whether it was lead-lined or not, but working on the assumption that
it wasn’t, it all comes back down to the house it was in. Yep, concrete is a pretty
decent thing to have between yourself and an oncoming nuclear blast.
Approximately 60cm of concrete will reduce gamma radiation by a factor of a thousand
and just 6cm of concrete will halve it. If you want to be really safe 2 meters of concrete
will reduce it by a factor of a billion. Either way, without knowing exactly how thick the
walls were in Survival Town’s concrete house, it seems like that might explain why the food
stayed safe.
Unless you have a fridge with an extremely generous lead lining, it’s probably not
going to make much difference to your odds of surviving Judgment Day.
So what should you do in the event of a nuclear attack? Handily we’ve already put together
a few tips that might just save your life should the worst happen.
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