The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is responsible for establishing rules, licensing, oversight, enforcement, evaluation, incident response, and support provision concerning civilian nuclear projects. 10 CFR Part 50 is the two-step licensing process that approves a construction permit and an operating license. 10 CFR Part 52 deals with other licensing processes such as early site permits, standard design certification, combined license, manufacturing license, duplicate plant license, standard design approval, and site suitability reviews. 10 CFR Part 53 is under development, which will encapsulate the new frameworks required for licensing and regulating advanced nuclear reactors. The approval process is sequential and involves several government bodies such as the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS), public meetings, and hearings. For the issuance of a combined license, the licensee must meet specific Inspections, Tests, Analyses, and Acceptance Criteria standards called ITAAC. If the submissions made to the NRC do not contain enough information to meet the regulation requirements, the NRC issues a Request for Additional Information (RAI). Thus, the licensee has to go through a paperwork-intensive process that involves multiple regulatory agencies for the various licensing requirements.&nbsp;&nbsp;Moreover, the current method of communication with the NRC is limited to either physical or E-mail. Dispatching physical documentation copies to the NRC is a time-consuming process. The use of e-mail communication facilitates the reduction in the transport of documents; however, it still retains the need for scanning physical documents and uploading them. As a result, volumes of physical paper-trails have to be generated, classified, archived, and tracked by the licensee.&nbsp;This paper explored blockchain technology’s implementation to address the need for a real-time, digitized documentation platform in the nuclear power industry’s licensing and regulation process. With blockchain-based smart contracts, the paperwork required for licensing was digitized, ensuring a greater degree of security and transparency. Additionally, it enforced the requirement that all parties involved fulfill all aspects of the contract. By leveraging smart contracts at the core of all licensing applications, the NRC can (1) specify conditions for only accepting fully complete information sets and (2), in case of lack of information, send automated RAIs. The implementation of DLT explored in this paper was a&nbsp; ledger controlled by the NRC to review applications. As the application moves forward through the licensing process, the licensee and the NRC have digitized and real-time oversight over the review process's progress.&nbsp;&nbsp;In recent years, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have found practical uses beyond conventional cryptocurrencies in the healthcare, education, and data security domains by enabling trusted environments for information sharing. The main advantage of distributed ledger technologies like blockchain is their cryptographically secure properties. Unlike a single centralized database, the users can perform copy, update, and append operations to the data stored in all other connected nodes to the blockchain, verifying the added data’s integrity. By continuously verifying copies of data with other peers on the blockchain, this process ensures that the information is secure and tamperproof. As a result, DLT offers advantages such as inter-organizational trust and secure digitization of paperwork. This paper’s ledger system is an extensible, distributed, modular, access-controlled, and open-source ledger system implemented over the Hyperledger-Fabric. Hyperledger-Fabric differentiates itself from existing blockchain solutions in its approach to existing smart contracts instead of those defined with cryptocurrency or domain-specific languages.

Evaluating the Implementation of Distributed Ledger Technology for the Licensing and Regulation of Nuclear Power Plants

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.