AUDIT TRAILS FOR WASTE | WASTE MANAGEMENT Current Safeguards Reporting SLAFKA Safeguards Reporting
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SLAFKA uses distributed ledger technology for tracking nuclear material at the national level Source: SLAFKA
In the UK, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA)
is responsible for the country’s nuclear waste management. NDA’s largest operation, Sellafield Ltd, hosts 80% of the UK’s nuclear waste inventory, where waste volume is expected to grow from 202,000 cubic metres in 2019 to 4.3 million cubic metres by 2135. With one in five steps of the nuclear waste tracking process relying on paper or manual steps, the ability to currently locate and track radioactive waste data moving through the NDA estate requires significant effort involving multiple actors, siloed databases and legacy systems. This is particularly difficult every three years, when the UK’s radioactive waste inventory is updated. This involves collecting information regarding more than 1,300 radioactive waste streams and 60 radioactive material streams. Metadata accompanying nuclear waste data is also
growing and can be difficult to manage if not captured at the time it is created. Metadata on a waste container, for example, can represent its technical attributes, ID, who has accessed it, information related to sensors/devices (including instrumentation health and status), and the origin and definitions of the chemical and radionuclide inventory in the waste. Metadata can help make data easier to find though, as
well as understand its origin/provenance/authenticity, and enable explainable machine-learning and AI in valuable datasets used over time. The OCED’s Nuclear Energy Agency established the Radioactive Waste Repository Metadata Management (RepMet) project in 2014, with recommendations for a set of metadata that can be used by national radioactive waste programmes to manage and harmonise radwaste repository data for long-term management and use. RepMet did not consider technological options for data management, but STUK and Sellafield UK’s blockchain tests identified benefits for supply chain operations and long-term data management.
Blockchain benefits Blockchain is a subset of distributed ledger technology (DLT), the catch-all category for decentralised digital databases that can include a wide range of participants and data sources from multiple locations. These platforms encrypt, timestamp, replicate and store cryptographically “hashed” data into an immutable ledger which in turn becomes the single source of truth for a distributed set of participants.
Data is appended and embedded making it extremely
difficult to manipulate, allowing stakeholders to interact in a trusted environment. To increase security, generally no data files are physically stored on the blockchain. Instead, only the hash and/or metadata is posted. Blockchain technology is often associated with
cryptocurrencies which detracts from its more useful applications for tracking supply chains, processes, documents and files. Bitcoin, considered the technology’s flagship, is the world’s first open blockchain; a platform that allows anyone with an internet connection to participate in a system of digital payments. Most enterprise solutions employing blockchain today are private, permissioned systems, restricting access to relevant stakeholders and consensus on validation. Indeed, the Government of Estonia was already developing the first permissioned blockchain platform before the Bitcoin Whitepaper was published in October 2008. Since then, advances in private, permissioned and hybrid (a mix of public and permissioned) blockchain platforms have broadened to secure transactions of all types, whether linked to high value assets such as diamonds, reducing invoice discrepancies or providing provenance for the carbon offset market in the aviation industry. DLT excels at using data and metadata in various ways.
Once added to the DLT platform, metadata is stored permanently and cannot be changed. This makes metadata reliable and tamper-evident, providing a high-level of assurance to users that the information is trustworthy. DLT also enables data transparency to those authorised, making it easy to track the history of specific metadata, such as origin, ownership, and status of an asset or transaction. Metadata can be added to provide additional information about an asset such as date, time and parties involved. Metadata is also used to automatically perform specific actions based on predefined conditions, for example, sending a notification if a specific waste container has not moved by a specified date as required.
Accounting data tracking Several studies and proof of concepts have focused on the potential for DLT to create greater efficiencies in nuclear material accounting and tracking radioactive waste. In 2019, STUK partnered with the Stimson Center in
Washington, DC, and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), in Sydney, Australia, to develop a first-of-its-kind
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