Digitising the waste handling supply chain for the long-term:
a real-world case study

Sellafield Ltd, Digital Catapult and RKVST recently worked on a project to explore how innovations in distributed ledger technology (DLT) could be used to solve current and future nuclear industry challenges. The project successfully demonstrated how digitizing the process would save time, eliminate transcription errors and significantly reduce the long-term cost. Over the next 120 years, Sellafield is committed to decommissioning and rendering safe an estimated 1.8 million tonnes of nuclear waste derived from facilities that date back to the 1950s. Data from today will be essential information for nuclear workers in the twenty-second century and beyond. Locating and tracking nuclear waste requires significant effort, involving the manual coordination of multiple entities and actors across the nuclear waste management lifecycle, querying and updating information in dispersed data silos, and continually ensuring compliance in an evolving regulatory landscape. The primary goal of the nuclear waste tracking challenge was to build a working prototype for a digital solution that would: • Provide global waste asset visibility • Ensure compliance with waste acceptance criteria • Allow device-agnostic access • Deliver continuous information assurance with accessibility, security, and resilience • Integrate with industrial internet of things (IoT) sensors • Result in cost savings and process improvements This session explains how the multi-stakeholder physical processes associated with nuclear waste handling were mapped into digital data flows and brought to bear on problems of data security, long term integrity, and changing regulatory landscapes.