The Nuclear Information Handbook has been published as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis in Japan. It begins with a synopsis of the accident and continues with a description of relevant dosage reporting units, definitions, concepts, radiation protection guidelines, and other information that make it easy for the layperson to understand and evaluate this or any other nuclear accident. This handbook also includes a country-by-country database of Chernobyl fallout, which helps to provide a context for understanding the Fukushima disaster. It also includes a review of the fuel cladding failure accidents, which closed the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company at Wiscasset, Maine - information relevant to the operation and decommissioning of many of the world's aging nuclear reactors. The text contains links to important online sources of radiological surveillance data about the ongoing accident in Japan as well as to other important nuclear safety information sources. Extracted from the online archives of RADNET's Nuclear Information on the Internet, this handbook is sponsored by the Environmental History Department of the Davistown Museum in Liberty, Maine and is published by the Pennywheel Press.
About the Author: A former volunteer fireman (1963-83), H. G. Skip Brack holds degrees in English from the University of Massachusetts (1966) and the University of Colorado (1967) and was an English instructor at the University of the Pacific. Skip was also a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped organize the Stop the Draft movement before leaving academia. In 1970, he was an Earth Day organizer, speaker, researcher, and Director of the New England Ecology Center. He organized the die-in at Logan Airport to protest the supersonic transport (SST), which was cancelled by the US Senate in December of 1970. After moving to West Jonesport, Maine, in the summer of 1970, he opened the Jonesport Wood Company, Inc. and has been in the used hand tool business ever since. Brack now operates tool stores in Hulls Cove, Searsport, and Liberty, Maine. In 1972, Brack organized the Center for Biological Monitoring (1972-2000) and began collating research on chemical fallout and anthropogenic radiation. Skip moved to Hulls Cove in 1983, where he still lives. In 1994, Brack established RADNET: Nuclear Information on the Internet. In 1999, he founded the Davistown Museum, a regional tool, art, and history museum in Liberty, Maine. The Center for Biological Monitoring Archives is now a component of the museum's Department of Environmental History. The museum's extensive website is a major resource for persons, including homeschoolers, interested in New England's Native American, maritime, and industrial history, and the history of hand tools and how they were forged.