Purdue Nuclear Reactor Test Demonstrates Remote, Automated Power Control

Engineers at Purdue University have, for the first time in the U.S., adjusted a nuclear reactor’s power experimentally, remotely and automatically in real time—a demonstration they say offers an early glimpse of how next-generation reactors could be monitored and controlled from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The demonstration, revealed in July, linked PUR-1, Purdue’s 64-year-old research reactor, with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and a Microsoft cloud system in a three-site loop spanning Indiana and Idaho. However, according to Stylianos Chatzidakis, the Purdue assistant professor and associate PUR-1 director who led the work, while the milestone is significant, he is careful to qualify it. “We showed that you can achieve remote monitoring and remote control of a reactor,” he told POWER in an interview. “This is an experiment. We didn’t actually remotely control the reactor.” The work builds on PUR-1, Purdue University Reactor Number One (Figure 1), a teaching reactor converted in 2019 to the first fully digital instrumentation and control (I&C) system licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)–funded conversion, under grant DE-NE000498, provided researchers a platform for testing I&C architectures that future small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors are expected…