Recent advancements in reactor designs could offer new revolutionary capabilities, including remote monitoring, increased flexibility, and reduced operation and maintenance costs. Embracing new digital technologies would allow for operational concepts such as semiautonomous or near-autonomous control, and two-way communications for real-time integration with the upcoming smart electric grid. However, such continuous data transmission from and toward a reactor site could potentially introduce new challenges and vulnerabilities, necessitating the prioritization of cybersecurity.

Conventional information technology–based encryption schemes, which rely mostly on computational complexity, have been shown to be vulnerable to cyberattacks. With the advent of quantum computing, practically any asymmetric encryption could be potentially compromised. For example, it has been shown that a RSA-2048 bit key could be broken in 8 h.

To address this challenge, we explore the feasibility of quantum key distribution (QKD) to secure communications. QKD is a physical layer security scheme relying on the laws of quantum mechanics instead of mathematical complexity. QKD promises not only unconditional security but also detection of potential intrusion, as it allows the communication parties to become aware of eavesdropping. To test the proposed hypothesis, a novel simulation tool (NuQKD) was developed to allow for real-time simulation of the BB84 QKD protocol between two remote terminals. A reference scenario is proposed, generic enough to cover various internal and external communication links to a reactor site. Using NuQKD, the internal and external data links were modeled, and receiver operating characteristic curves were calculated for various QKD configurations.

A performance analysis was conducted, demonstrating that QKD can provide adequate secret key rates with low false alarms and has the potential of addressing the nuclear industry’s high standards of confidentiality for distance lengths up to 75 km of fiberoptics. Using a conservative estimation, QKD can provide up to 21.5 kbps of secret key rate for a distance of 1 km and 14.4 kbps at 10 km. The target secret key rates for the corresponding links were estimated at 16 kbps and 80 bps, respectively, based on the analysis of real data from a PUR-1 fully digital reactor. Consequently, QKD is shown to be compatible with existing and future point-to-point reactor communication architectures. These results motivate further study of quantum communications for nuclear reactors.