I am in awe. I didn’t realize how mature was the bomb shelter industry.  From the October 2010 Wired (p.112, not yet online):

Kennedy-era fallout shelters were little more than cement boxes filled with cans of spinach. Modern end-time housing structures, like those from Radius Engineering, are smart and stylish. Take the [$160M] Trongonia 8, a modular, self-sufficient, radiation-proof colony – complete with fitness center, restaurants, and city hall – that will keep as many as 2000 people safe and snug for up to five years. …. Radius’ shelters start at $200,000; the [36 person] multifamily pod shown below goes for $2 million, plus about 25 percent for shipping and installation. They all have fiberglass shells. … The bunkers can run for [4] years entirely off the grid. … And they’re buried far enough underground to be impervious to radiation. … The sealed and pressurized units come with specially designed air filtration that uses three different physical purifiers and an ultraviolet-radiation sterilization system. Radius has installed more than 1000 shelters worldwide over the past 30 years; most are intended to protect key people in the government, military, insurance industry, and medical services.

Check out the impressive attention to detail at the Radius Engineering website.

To me, this is all good news about humanity’s ability to survive severe disaster.  And it makes me sad that the usual reaction to stories like this is to make fun of the people who would want such a shelter. Apparently, being concerned about disaster is taken to be a bad sign; they might believe in 2012 Mayan calendar prophesies, for example, or worry too much about their precious bodily fluids. But regardless of the impressiveness of their motives, the act of creating a shelter which might make the difference in preventing humanity’s extinction is a kind and generous act toward vast future generations which might not otherwise exist.  If charity was about help, rather than signaling loyalty or wealth, we would celebrate such people.

I wonder where it would be legal to rent out a bed in such a shelter, to support refuge futures. Radius says:

The smaller shelters have no foundation and are therefore not considered a permanent structure and therefore DO NOT require a building permit.   The larger  shelters have a concrete foundation however it is poured in a fiberglass tray.  Since the concrete is within the Radius structure, the foundation is not considered permanent.

Could one rent it as a “campsite”?