Also on today’s menu:
Panel Advises Sharing Info On Cyber Attacks
Nuclear Is ‘Not A Viable Option’
Japan To Dump Radioactive Water Into Pacific
Parents of students attending Franklin High School will have a chance to learn about Lakes Region Community College’s E-Start program today at 3 p.m. in the high school cafeteria. The E-Start program, along with the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, are the school district’s emergency solutions to the teacher shortage that has prevented the high school from offering several math and science courses this year. Principal David Levesque said, “We are working to make sure kids get whatever they need to be successful.”
The high school, which is short two math and two science teachers, will not offer more advance math courses than geometry, and only physical science.
The district will be able to cover “some but not all” of the costs associated with enrollment elsewhere, Levesque said. To make up for the lack of in-district classes, there may be an option of having an in-school teacher available to help students when needed, and perhaps course-sharing with the Winnisquam Regional High School in Tilton.
Panel Advises Sharing Info On Cyber Attacks
U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan organized a panel at Saint Anselm College on August 21 to discuss the vulnerability of K-12 schools to cyber attacks. The panel included Pam McLeod of the New Hampshire Student Privacy Alliance and the New Hampshire Chief Technology Officers Council; Daniel King, New England chief of cybersecurity for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; New Hampshire Department of Information Technology Commissioner Dennis Goulet; Timothy Benitez, the Manchester resident agent in charge of the United States Secret Service; and Richard Rossi, New Hampshire cybersecurity advisor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Attackers often focus on multiple victims, but because individual school districts often are reluctant to report breaches, other districts are unable to prepare for attacks, and law enforcement cannot build a bigger case or prevent future infiltrations. A week after the Nashua School District was breached, Benitez said, a school district in the Upper Valley was attacked by hackers. Nashua Superintendent Mario Andrade had waited two months before sending an email to parents and staff members to inform them that the district had made significant improvements to security systems that had been breached, saying they were “unaware of any actual or attempted misuse of any personal information because of the cyberattack” but he recommended that parents and staff members “remain vigilant against incidents of identity theft and fraud by reviewing account statements and explanations of benefits and monitoring free credit reports for suspicious activity.”
Often, private law firms and insurance companies advise their clients not to report cyber attacks. We have reported on Peterborough’s computer hack that robbed the town of $2.3 million. Primex, the Public Risk Management Exchange that provides pooled insurance coverage to municipalities, schools, and counties, paid the ransom to unlock the town’s computers and asked the Atom Group of Portsmouth to harden Peterborough’s security. The state also has hired the Atom Group to oversee its cybersecurity and to pay cyber ransom in cryptocurrency when systems are breached. Globally recognized cyber expert Andy Jenkinson of the United Kingdom tested Atom Group’s own website and found several errors that could allow hackers to infiltrate the site and obtain personally identifiable information, or PII. Similarly, a test of Peterborough’s website showed that it remained vulnerable, according to Jenkinson.
Rather than keeping information about cyber attacks internal, reporting them can help the U.S. Secret Service, which has a branch dedicated to investigating cyber crime, to learn about the attacker and track down the offenders, said Benitez.
Nuclear Is ‘Not A Viable Option’
“Now is an opportune time to revisit nuclear power to determine the current state of technology and possible applications for energy production in New Hampshire during the coming decade.” So states the unofficial website of the Commission to Investigate the Implementation of Next Generation Nuclear Reactor Technology in New Hampshire, established by the passage of HB543. The bill was sponsored by state representatives Keith Ammon (R-New Boston), Jason Osborne (R-Auburn), and Michael Vose (R-Rockingham), and signed by Governor Chris Sununu in June 2022.
The study group’s members include several Republican legislators, one of whom worked at the Seabrook nuclear power plant; a lobbyist for a “consumer group” that counts Exxon/Mobil and the Nuclear Industry Institute among its members; Seabrook Station’s regulatory affairs manager; and representatives of Sununu’s administrative agencies. Paul Gunter calls it the “Commission to Implement More Exorbitantly Expensive and Inherently Dangerous Nuclear Power.”
Gunter was first arrested 47 years ago for protesting the Seabrook nuclear plant, and he has been keeping an eye on the alkali-silica reaction that has caused micro-fractures in the concrete underneath Seabrook’s operating reactor. While new-generation plants such as the Vogtle 3 nuclear plant in Georgia are heralded as “safer and more reliable than older generation systems designed in the last century,” Gunter believes nuclear power is no more an answer to the climate crisis than they were when Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss declared that the reactors would produce electricity “too cheap to meter.”
“Efforts to implement a new Generation IV of ‘advanced’ and small modular reactors are already running into the same decades-old obstacles that all of the previous generations of nuclear reactor designs never resolved,” Gunter says. “These obstacles include the mounting environmental consequences of unmanaged nuclear waste, uncontrolled construction cost, and unreliable time to completion and outright failure to complete projects.”
Georgia Power’s Vogtle 3 reactor went into operation six years late and billions of dollars over budget. The Financial Times said that it has “made the megaproject as much a cautionary tale as a new chapter for atomic investment.” Along with Vogtle 4, which Georgia Power says will go online by early 2024, “The $14bn original cost of Vogtle units 3 and 4 has now ballooned to more than $30bn.” New Hampshire Consumer Advocate Don Kreis agrees that Vogtle’s delays and cost overruns “prove that industry still has not figured out how to make new nuclear plants a viable option.”
Japan To Dump Radioactive Water Into Pacific
Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, announced this morning that Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant that was damaged in a 2011 tsunami, should “promptly prepare” to release its treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean on August 24, despite it not being entirely radiation-free. The 1.34 million tons of water — enough to fill 500 Olympic-size pools — still contains tritium and carbon-14, radioactive isotopes of hydrogen and carbon, but experts say they emit very low levels of radiation and are not a danger unless consumed in large quantities. Nuclear plants around the world regularly release waste water with tritium levels above that of the treated water from Fukushima.
The water will be filtered and diluted before being released over 30 years. Still, many people, including fishermen in the region, worry that discharging the treated water will affect their livelihoods. China has accused Japan of treating the ocean like its “private sewer” and Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said China would take “necessary measures to safeguard the marine environment, food safety, and public health” and “immediately activate” import curbs on some Japanese food products. Both South Korea and China have already banned fish imports from around Fukushima.
A crowd of protesters staged a rally outside the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo, urging the government to stop the release. Yet, despite its ban on fish from the area, South Korea’s government endorsed the plan and accused protesters of scaremongering. The International Atomic Energy Agency says the release will have a “negligible” impact on the environment.
Do you have a story to tell?
The News Café is a virtual meeting place where, each weekday, we discuss the news of the day: local, statewide, national, and international. Subscribers can share their knowledge, thoughts, and questions about any topic, and we may select some of those subjects for more in-depth analysis.
Subscriptions to the News Café are free, but compiling these summaries and preparing the information takes time, so we encourage you to consider a paid subscription to help make the effort worthwhile. Click the Subscribe button to select a free or paid subscription.
Visit us at www.libertymedianh.org
Join in the conversation through chat or notes by downloading the Substack app or going to the online site.
Also see our new Substack news site, By The Way.