Abstract
Safety-Critical Systems (SCSs) often manage sensible data that must be trustworthy, especially in many cases in which different actors participate whose interests may not coincide. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has emerged to ensure the trustfulness of data. The nuclear industry incorporates many SCSs where blockchain can be applied. This paper focuses on the use of blockchain for the inspection of steam generators of a nuclear power plant. This is a critical process where different actors participate: plant property, external companies in charge of the inspection itself and different administrations. It typically consists of a number of processes that explore the state of different components of the plant in order to find any kind of failure or defect and it generates a great amount of data that must be verifiable and trustworthy. A distributed blockchain-based system is presented where all the nodes share the information and it cannot be altered. As a novelty, automatic inspection algorithms are stored in the blockchain itself by means of smart contracts. The benefits of blockchain are studied for the nuclear industry in general and for the inspection process in particular. In order to explore the possible drawbacks of a blockchain-based system for data management, a simulator has been implemented to recreate the scenario of an inspection. The results obtained show that blockchain architectures are a good alternative to traditional information repositories for nuclear power plant inspections.
Highlights
Safety-Critical Systems are those systems whose failure could result in loss of lives and significant property or in environment damage [1]
We have proposed a new platform based on Hyperledger framework for tube inspection of nuclear power plants to increase the trust in the processes involved
Smart contracts are used to implement automatic analysis algorithms that are stored in the blockchain itself and cannot be tampered with
Summary
Safety-Critical Systems are those systems whose failure could result in loss of lives and significant property or in environment damage [1]. The steam generator (SG) is one of the most critical components of a Pressurized Water type nuclear power plant; its function is to transfer the heat from the reactor cooling system to the secondary side of the tubes which contain feed. SG tubes are inspected by means of Non Destructive Testing (NDT) technique that consists of the detection, characterization and measurement of loss of tube wall thickness, erosion, cracking, etc, with a view to increasing the safety and availability of the component This check is performed using multi-frequency, digital, robot-operated, remote-controlled equipment. Immutable and tamper-proof inspection information can be another source of confidence in the nuclear industry. In this sense, blockchain is presented as a technology that can help to achieve these goals.
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