Composed of dozens of school buses surrounded with concrete, there may not be room for two of every Earthly animal in this “Ark Two” but there is space for around 500 humans (kids and adults) to cohabitate through a moderate apocalypse.

Located in Horning’s Mills (in case you need to get there in an emergency) on the edge of Toronto, Canada, this remarkable shelter features 10,000 feet of subterranean space. The resulting mega-structure is the largest known private fallout shelter on the North American continent.

Bruce and Jean Beach, a local couple, live on adjacent land and built their underground bunker to last, encasing a series of interconnected buses in solid concrete. As it turns out: a derelict bus is cheap, costing just a few hundred dollars, but its reinforced steel frame makes it a strong candidate to be used for a mold. The buses are carefully aligned to create sequential spaces serving different key functions.

And it wasn’t just built for the pair of them: it is equipped with a well and plumbing, kitchen and laundry areas, even spaces dedicated for doctors and daycare centers (complete with emergency and surgery rooms). The couple constructed the place decades ago, not so much as a space for immediate survival but an outpost from which the world could be built in a post-nuclear age.

The complex doesn’t have a permit, which has landed its builders in court on more than one occasion, but officials seem largely content to let them be at this point. Meanwhile, Cold War or not, the dedicated couple (now well into their 80s) continue to build up supplies and prepare the space for uncertain futures. It may yet pay off.

In an unprecedented feat of engineering, the world’s most infamous nuclear disaster site has been covered by a huge prefabricated steel arch designed to shield the world from its fallout. Made to fit over the so-called sarcophagus, a crumbling concrete and lead shelter initially erected at the site, the New Safe Confinement structure spans nearly 1,000 feet horizontally.

The original protective shell over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor was a hurried affair and never meant to be permanent — 4,000 people in the region were still killed in the initial catastrophic meltdown but many more were saved thanks to this hasty intervention.

In the days, weeks and months following the disaster, hundreds of thousands of evacuees and emergency workers were exposed to dangerous radiation.

At the cost of 1.5 billion dollars the new lid is also not a solution to last forever, but it is designed to last for 100 years. Weighing 36,000 tons and taller than the statue of liberty (354 feet) the monstrous structure is only partially complete — it still needs to be rendered airtight and radiation equipment is yet to be installed. The entire thing has been constructed offsite on nearby land before being moved into place.

Despite warnings about dangerous radiation many families have already taken up residence around Ukraine’s famous failed nuclear reactor. This skyscraper acknowledges that trend, and would help enable settlers to make their moves in somewhat safer conditions. The skin of the building provides more than just shelter, glowing like a grounded aurora as it captures and processes radiation – all in the midst of an ongoing project to cap and contain further fallout.

Designed by Zhang Zehua, Song Qiang and Liu Yameng, Unexpected Aurora filters air and water, harvests solar energy, and creates a kind of self-contained oasis that would allow people to resettle the wastelands around Pripyat with less exposure to harm. Their design won them an honorable mention in the 2015 eVolo Skyscraper Competition.

Protocol for many irradiated sites is simply a bit of soil coverage (as little as a few feet) and conversion to a park (as opposed to homes), the idea being: a bit of exposure here and there is not too harmful, though living right on top of contaminated areas could be. Many parks in San Francisco, for instance, were built on sites once used as test beds for hosing down irradiated ships. These vessels were intentionally placed close to oceanic nuclear tests to see if they could subsequently be cleaned. As the government learned, you cannot wash away the radiation, but trying to do so does cause some to leak into the surrounding ground. Of course, the situation in and around Pripyat is significantly more severe than secondary runoff.

The creators set the scene: “With a big bang, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, the amount of radiation is about 400 times of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima. About seven million people were forced to leave their homeland in two days, they had no time to say goodbye to their present life.”

They also acknowledge the aftermath: “But not everyone accepts the arrangement of fate. The negative effects of radiation have been dafeated by a large group of settlers, more and more people are returning to their homeland which located in the restricted area, what can be sure is that they use a different way to look at the risk which they bear.”

There is no perfect solution for a complex problem like this, and the concept is unlikely ever to be realized, but at least this approach recognizes the reality on the ground and attempts to bridge the gap between an imperfect present and hopeful future. Meanwhile, the idea of a self-contained city is nothing new, and what would be learned from building one could even have applications for things like space settlements.

It is a dream home like any other of its era, with brick walls, sliding doors, stock windows and shingle roofs as well as a lawn, garden, trees and pool. The difference? It is set two stories underground in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the faux flora never wilts nor does it grow, and it is for sale.

If this real-life 1970s home seems like something out of a science-fiction movie, you may be remembering the film Blast from the Past, in which the protagonist spends decades underground in vintage fallout shelter styled after a mid-century suburban home and garden.

Listed at 1.7 million dollars, this foreclosed property looks conventional at street level, but hides a stunning set of secret spaces below, including two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen and every other space you would expect inside and outside of a single-family house on the surface.

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