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EE AX FN FS LF PW DC BD PG AA FD HO MN MS SM SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/BUSINESS G

BY DOUGLAS MACMILLAN

IN FORKED RIVER, N.J.

BY PRANSHU VERMA

For years, Nate Hart admired a
drawing of a cat: It was gray, with
unusually large eyes, and pictured
on a shattered, smoldering tablet.
So last September, when the own-
er signaled they were willing to
sell, Hart swooped in and offered
a hefty sum: $600,000.
The price didn’t faze him be-
cause of a special detail: The car-
toon, part of collection of cat im-
ages called CryptoKitties, is a non-
fungible token, or NFT. NFTs are
like Internet land deeds, letting
owners lay claim to digital art,
music and photographs. By certi-
fying the asset on a digital ledger,
called the blockchain, NFTs have
transformed online art, turning
images into coveted assets that
can be owned and that presum-
ably rise in value.
Around the time of his pur-
chase, the market for NFTs was
red-hot. Celebrities minted their
own, Adidas partnered with
prominent collectors, and Hart
was part of a throng paying thou-
sands — and in some cases mil-
lions — to scoop up their own
digital art.
People paid eye-popping num-
bers: $69 million for a JPEG file by
the digital artist Beeple; $10.5 mil-
lion for a pixelated image that
resembled the Joker character in
Batman; and $5.4 million for a
token of Edward Snowden’s face
made out of court documents.
SEE NFT ON G2

Investors in

NFTs s tuck

in limbo

Digital art once worth

millions plummets in

value after crypto crash

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Workers at Holtec’s manufacturing plant in Camden, N.J. On the left are steel canisters that store nuclear waste. The firm seeks to profitably dismantle nuclear plants.

T

he new owner took over the Oyster

Creek Nuclear Generating Station in

2019, promising to dismantle one of the

nation’s oldest nuclear plants at mini-

mal cost and in record time. Then came a series

of worrisome accidents.

One worker was struck by a 100-ton metal

reactor dome. Another was splashed with

radioactive water, according to internal inci-

dent reports and regulatory inspection reports

reviewed by The Washington Post. Another

worker drove an excavator into an electrical

wire on his first day on the job, knocking out

power to 31,000 homes and businesses on the

New Jersey coast, according to a police report

and the local power company.

All three incidents occurred on the watch of

Holtec International, a nuclear equipment

manufacturer based in Jupiter, Fla. Though the

company until recently had little experience

shutting down nuclear plants, Holtec has

emerged as a leader in nuclear cleanup, a

burgeoning field riding an expected wave of

closures as licenses expire for the nation’s aging

nuclear fleet.

Over the past three years, Holtec has pur-

chased three plants in three states, and it

expects to finalize a fourth purchase this

summer. The company is seeking to profitably

SEE HOLTEC ON G4

A big, dangerous job

In burgeoning nuclear

cleanup industry,

accidents spur calls for

more oversight

BY DREW HARWELL

Millions of children had their
online behaviors and personal in-
formation tracked by the apps and
websites they used for school dur-
ing the pandemic, according to an
international investigation that
raises concerns about the impact
remote learning had on children’s
privacy online.
The educational tools were rec-
ommended by school districts and
offered interactive math and read-
ing lessons to children as young as
prekindergarten. But many of
them also collected students’ in-
formation and shared it with mar-
keters and data brokers, who
could then build data profiles
used to target the children with
ads that follow them around the
Web.
Those findings come from the
most comprehensive study to date
on the technology that children
and parents relied on for nearly
two years as basic education shift-
ed from schools to homes.
Researchers with the advocacy
group Human Rights Watch ana-
lyzed 164 educational apps and
websites used in 49 countries, and
they shared their findings with
The Washington Post and 12 other
news organizations around the
world. The consortium, EdTech
Exposed, was coordinated by the
investigative nonprofit the Sig-
nals Network and conducted fur-
ther reporting and technical
r eview.
What the researchers found
was alarming: Nearly 90 percent
of the educational tools were de-
signed to send the information
they collected to ad-technology
companies, which could use it to
estimate students’ interests and
predict what they might want to
buy.
Researchers found that the
tools sent information to nearly
200 ad-tech companies, but that
few of the programs disclosed to
SEE APPS ON G2

Educational

apps track

students’

private data

Research finds 90% of

such tools passed info

to ad-tech companies