Fallout shelter questions

I have constructed a fallout shelter on my rural acreage. The shelter consists of a 10' diameter by 18.5 feet long steel tank buried into the side of a hill with a walkout entrance on the downhill side of the slope. the tank itself has 3' of earth cover minimum. I also built an escape hatch in the rear of the shelter accessed via a permanently mounted ladder inside the shelter. My hope was to get natural airflow (the hatch is designed so that even when closed, it allows air to flow out of the shelter) with cooler air being drawn in through the front entrance/room and warmer air naturally flowing up and out the escape hatch.

In front of the walk-out door (which is a heavy steel door with a filtered air vent, I built a room with large concrete blocks (2'x 4' and 2'x 6'). the roof of the room was created with large wooden timbers covered with corrugated metal sheets and 3' of earth. My thinking was that this room would give me an exits with two 90 degree turns to the exit to avoid radiation and it would also serve as both a "bathroom" and additional storage space.

I have two important questions about this set up. First, the room I built out of the large concrete blocks, has "gaps" in it where the blocks (which were not perfectly rectangular or uniform in size) do not but up against each other perfectly leaving small gaps. these gaps are small, no wider than 1 3/4 inches at the widest, but they do penetrate the entire width of the 2' wide wall. How much will these gaps reduce the shielding/protection factor of the room?

My second question has to do with the escape hatch in the rear. But since this hatch is directly over the rear of the main shelter (the tank), I was worried about radiation exposure through the hatchway. In an effort to address this, I stacked up 2'x 6' blocks 2 high on two sides of the hatch (front and rear) and then placed 3 more of the same blocks so that the span the two sets of blocks on either side of the hatch. This, I think, solved the shielding issue, but I've decided that I don't like this solution because the blocks have no rebar reinforcement in them and I'm afraid that they might fail and collapse at some point, blocking my escape hatch. Does anyone have a better solution to the shielding gap created by the hatchway...or am I over-thinking this?

Thanks.

Bob

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Fallout shelter questions