WASTE MANAGEMENT | AUDIT TRAILS FOR WASTE
Audits and the waste data trail
The layered system of governance for nuclear materials generates
huge volumes of data across multiple stakeholders in multiple jurisdictions. Now, blockchain technology may help to address a major data challenge faced by the nuclear industry
By Cindy Vestergaard, VP Special Projects and External Relations at DataTrails
NUCLEAR GOVERNANCE COMPRISES A COMPLEX web of obligations from the local to national, bilateral, regional and international levels applied at each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. It is a system designed to avoid disruption, focusing rightly on maintaining and certifying the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear material and technology. This layered system of governance generates large volumes of data across multiple stakeholders in multiple jurisdictions. It also engenders a resistance to new technologies which has left many operators and regulators stuck with clunky, siloed legacy systems, and labour-intensive manual or paper-based processes. With digitisation and emerging technologies producing even more data-rich environments, information management systems today need to capture and protect both a greater variety and a growing quantity of data, including metadata. Blockchain technology is offering solutions for adding audit trails to digital data, ensuring a distributed record of who did what and when to what file, allowing all stakeholders to verify an action that was taken this morning, or 10 days ago, or 10 years ago, was the right one. Organisations such as Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear
Safety Authority (STUK) and Sellafield Ltd have already tested blockchain technology and demonstrated that it offers data authentication, transparency and immutability.
This enables full visibility of waste streams and enhances nuclear material accountancy and compliance with national legislation and confidentiality rules.
The data challenge Data collected by organisations responsible for radioactive waste repositories must be managed over long timelines, typically beyond 100 years. This data includes everything from waste characterisation to environmental monitoring, nuclear safety, security and safeguards. As a country’s nuclear fuel cycle matures, the quantity, type and quality of data increases throughout the different stages of decommissioning facilities, repository development and regulatory and community approvals, for example pre-siting, siting, site characterisation, construction, operations, pre-closure and closure. For used fuel from reactors, the task becomes more challenging given physical inspection of the material becomes impossible once it is placed more than 400 metres underground. For STUK, “the significance of data integrity is immense when it comes to safeguarding the geological repository at Olkiluoto. The underground facility is the world’s first for used fuel and the first for the application of European and international safeguards at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle”.
Above: Organisations such as Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) have already tested blockchain technology Photo credit: IAEA
22 | January 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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