Cindy Vestergaard is the Stimson Centre Director, Nuclear Safeguards Program & Director, Blockchain in Practice program. In this podcast we discuss the interesting work she does in safeguarding nuclear material with blockchain technology.

 What is blockchain?Blockchain is a subset of DLT, which is essentially a combination of a variety of different technologies that have been around for already a number of decades, such as peer to peer protocols, cryptography hashing, to make it an immutable ledger that can be shared securely, digitally, across the ecosystem.

 The Stimson Centre

The Stimson Centre is a think tank that was set up in 1989 by Barry Blechman & Michael Krepon at a time when the Cold War was ending shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a nonpartisan and independent centre that looks at real world problems.

The work that Cindy’s team does is evidence-based policy research that sits at the intersection of technology and policy.

 SLAFKA

In 2019 a partnership was established between the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), the Stimson Centre in Washington, D.C., and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, to develop the world’s first distributed ledger technology (DLT) prototype for safeguarding nuclear material, called SLAFKA.Finland is the first country in the world to be building a deep geological repository for its spent nuclear fuel. STUK, its radiation and nuclear safety authority approached the Stimson Centre for helping them develop a prototype.

The question for STUK and for the government of Finland needed to answer is how to ensure that the material underground is also the same that is reflected on the books above ground. Data integrity is very important. The other reason is concerning their relationship with Euratom, the regional safeguards body for the EU’s member states that ensures a regular and equitable supply of nuclear fuels to EU users. The objective is in increasing security, enhancing data sharing and transparency between STUK and Euratom.

For the Stimson Centre, the opportunity, was to see if DLT can actually handle the different types of transactions that are needed under a nuclear safeguards agreement.

 Data transactions and trust amongst partiesFrom a data transaction perspective; nuclear material moves within a facility, within a country and internationally. As it moves it also shifts in form for example from yellowcake or uranium ore concentrates to enriched uranium. All these movements and change of state have to be logged and reported to either a national regulator or a regional regulator such as Euratom within the EU and then to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Source: Stimson Centre

Today’s data transactions come in all shape and form both in terms of paper and in an electronic format. The IAEA has a portal for safeguards declarations but it isn’t universally used. Some countries still provide their declaration on a USB stick whilst others on paper.

In the nuclear world there isn’t a lot of trust among different parties. The IAEA goes in to monitor and verify that what states are doing is actually meeting their obligations in using nuclear material for peaceful purposes.

One of the reasons why the IAEA hasn’t launched a blockchain system is partly due to its stage of digitisation. International organisations such as the IAEA are the still the product of their member states. If member states are not willing to put money in certain thing then it takes a long time for them to happen.

 Launch of the Proof of Concept (PoC)On the 10th of March 2020 the SLAFKA PoC was officially launched in Helsinki. The purpose of the PoC was to demonstrate can the DLT SLAFA prototype handle nuclear safeguard transactions? The answer was yes. The platform was able to demonstrate transactions:

Shipping material within a country or outside of a country