SAFETY & SECURITY | ENSURING DATA INTEGRITY
Blockchain and data integrity
The Hamaoka data scandal shows the energy sector needs to get serious about data integrity. Without a robust and secure approach to ensuring any data fabrication is identified quickly, public safety is potentially put at risk and trust in the sector is damaged more broadly. Is a Blockchain standard the answer?
By Thomas Berndorfer, CEO, Connecting Software
The Hamaoka data scandal shows the energy sector needs to get serious about data integrity Source: Chubu Electric
JAPAN, AS A NATION SCARRED by the legacy of the Fukushima disaster, takes nuclear safety very seriously. Recently a scandal emerged that officials from the Hamaoka nuclear power plant, midway between Tokyo and Osaka, had manipulated and fabricated tectonic safety data in order to expedite a government review. The plant, and the company that ran it, Chubu Electric, had cherry picked tectonic data to use as a basis for its safety tests – allowing it to come up with an almost entirely fabricated result. Unsurprisingly, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority
has condemned this in the strongest possible terms and has proposed reviewing all of Chubu Electric’s safety data across its entire portfolio of plants. It’s far from the first case of manipulated data
compromising safety in the nuclear sector. In 2012, the Korea Hydroelectric and Nuclear Power corporation (KHNP) found that 7682 parts had been supplied to five of its nuclear power plants based on falsified test reports – totaling almost 2114 tests, or 0.7% of all equipment testing in the supply chain. This equipment was intended to form part of the safety and cooling systems for several reactors, meaning its failure at a critical point could have spelled disaster. More recently, the Halden reactor in Norway, which
was shut down in 2018, was found to have altered data numerous times in an effort that was described as “planned and well hidden”. Given this test reactor supplied information and results to numerous other reactors, these fabricated results could well have knock- on effects across the world. Cases of fabricated, altered or forged data, as well
as being potentially disastrous for public safety, cause real damage to public trust. Especially in the nuclear
94 | April 2026 |
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sector, where many communities and countries globally are wary of the technology, scandals like these will have significant commercial and regulatory implications – damaging the whole sector. Without clear and definite steps towards greater information security, the industry risks walking into these traps repeatedly.
Why data verification matters To be clear, incidents of outright data tampering like these are still fairly rare – but the one thing they have in common is that many, if not most, of these incidents could have been prevented by a unified standard of data verification. Ultimately, when verifying digital data – one needs to
know four things: ● Authenticity – is the document genuine? Has it been
certified and approved by the correct authorities using the correct procedures?
● Provenance – who created it, and when? Does the timestamp of the final document match when it was originally created?
● Integrity – has it been altered at any point? If it was certified as correct at a certain point in time, has it been changed since then?
● Chain-of-custody – has the document changed hands or been altered by a third party? Is the document the same at the point of receiving it than it was at the point of sending it?
Assurance on all these factors is vital for securing
important documents. Without a way of reliably verifying all of them, organisations open themselves up to several problems. First and foremost among these are unintentional and accidental changes. A zero
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