Assessing the Potential for Implementation of Distributed Ledger Technology in the Nuclear Power Plant Lifecycle

Abstract

The Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) project lifecycle consists of multiple organizations, private and public, that work together to carry out the licensing and regulation, commissioning, construction, supply chain management, decommissioning, and non-proliferation of nuclear power plants. Each stage of the lifecycle generates a considerable amount of documentation that needs to be archived and made available on request. In this paper, we examined the current frameworks employed by the stakeholders of nuclear power plant lifecycles for data generation, classification, archival, and exchange and we evaluated the use of distributed ledger technology for data management. We further demonstrated the implementation of distributed ledger technology to capturing and immutable recording nuclear supply chain structure, production, and failure data. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) promises to address the current bottlenecks in the lifecycle management of nuclear power plants with faster data exchange times, lower processing cost of documents, bridging the gap between perceived and actual risk, faster decisions, customizable transparency in job tasks being executed, improved cash flow, instant validation of job completion, reduction in logistical friction, and sped up supply chain decisions for clients. We gave a comprehensive review of distributed ledger technology, its properties and an open-source permissioned distributed ledger system called Hyperledger Fabric. Each sector of the nuclear power plant lifecycle was analyzed for data management bottlenecks and building on our discussion of employing distributed ledger technology we discussed the pathway in which Hyperledger Fabric can be employed to address the data management bottlenecks in each stage of the lifecycle including, licensing and regulation, commissioning, construction, supply chain management, decommissioning, and non-proliferation.