A platform allows tracing the components of a nuclear reactor. They hope that in the years to come it will become a required standard in the nuclear power industry.
A platform that an Argentine company developed allows tracing all the elements that constitute a nuclear reactor by uploading information on a blockchain.
The platform, whose name is NuclearisTrack, was developed by Nuclearis. This firm, which started in a garage in 2008, specializes in manufacturing components and finding engineering solutions for the nuclear power industry.
They mainly manufacture sealing rings, which serve as containment barriers for the primary circuit in the cooling channels in reactor cores. They manufacture the sealing rings that the Argentine nuclear power plants Atucha I and II use. In their expansion plan, they have opened commercial offices in the United States and China.
NuclearisTrack is built on the RSK network, which enables creating smart contracts and dApps secured with the computing power of Bitcoin.
“We have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, but we saw the possibility of using blockchain for the nuclear power sector,” said Santiago Badran, CEO of the company.
Traceability Is Essential for Nuclear Power Industry
The immutability of the data registered with NuclearisTrack is critical to the nuclear power industry. “Imagine uploading information that no one will ever be able to hack or modify to the blockchain,” said Badran to explain the basis of the development that they achieved.
Sebastián Martínez, CTO of Nuclearis, gave more details about the importance of traceability. He said that “the component of a nuclear reactor that we cannot support with documentation has no value.” “The documentation guarantees the quality of each document that we use, thus guaranteeing the reliability of the entire nuclear power plant,” he added.
Telling a joke typical of that industry, he mentioned that when a new component arrives at a nuclear power plant, it does so in a pickup truck, followed by a larger truck carrying the documentation for the component.
“All the documentation that supports the quality of the component is as important as the component itself,” he concluded. NuclearisTrack allows verifying that the documents have not undergone any changes, and it discards the possibility of making forgeries.
Free and Open Source Platform
The idea of Nuclearis is, as happened with the ISO 9001 standards, to reach the point where nuclear power plants require registering data on a blockchain. If this happened, they would exclude from the market those who do not comply with this procedure for lack of interest in working with them.
Martínez considers that someday when nuclear power plants make public tenders, they will ask their suppliers to comply with ISO 9001 standards and have the ability to upload their documents to a blockchain.
Future plans with NuclearisTrack include transforming the platform into an intuitive interface that does not require a programmer to adapt it to the needs of each user.
They will also seek ways to be able to upload the complete documents to the blockchain. At the moment, they can only upload “a fingerprint” that allows confirming that the paper-based document is genuine and has not undergone changes.
By Willmen Blanco
