Underground, on Purdue University’s campus in Indiana is the only nuclear reactor in the state, PUR–1. Although used only for research purposes – the total energy the reactor generates powers about the equivalent of 10 microwave ovens – the university’s reactor has specific features that no other reactor in the USA. has. However those features are not for present day reactors but for the coming generation.
PUR-1 has now started serving as the USA’s first reactor test bed to help the industry decide how digital communication, AI tools and cybersecurity methods could work at a larger scale for advanced reactors. PUR-1 was built in 1962 and converted from analogue to digital in 2019. It is the first in the country to be controlled and operated digitally rather than with the analogue technology that US reactors have been using since the 1960s.
Although some countries already have reactors with digital controls, PUR-1 is the only all-digital reactor that has been licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Digital twin
The lab of Purdue nuclear engineering assistant professor and associate PUR-1 director Sytliaos Chadzidakis completed building a ‘digital twin’ of PUR-1 in 2023 that has allowed his research group and collaborators to do experiments on a digital copy of the reactor without affecting its operation. Funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy supported the development of the digital twin, which is a fully integrated physics and data-driven simulation that receives measurements in real time from PUR-1’s sensors, makes predictions using AI-driven algorithms and provides insights that can inform reactor operations. Chatzidakis and his students access the twin on computers in a lab adjacent to the reactor facility. The experiments could accelerate the deployment of advanced reactors by testing new capabilities that may help lower costs, increase safety and lifespan.
Purdue University’s 63-year-old reactor gained capabilities in 2019 that next-generation reactors will also have when they are built, making it an ideal facility for testing the AI, remote monitoring, autonomous control and advanced cybersecurity techniques that newer reactors will be able to use.
With these features, future reactors could cost less to operate and maintain, be safer and last longer – removing barriers in building additional reactors to increase generation of carbon-free electricity. Research that Purdue engineers are conducting with these features is helping develop new techniques that reactors could use to achieve these goals, which align with the university’s efforts to investigate nuclear energy.
Test findings
In a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, Chatzidakis and other collaborators from Purdue and Argonne National Laboratory showed how PUR-1’s digital twin could test a machine learning algorithm they developed for improving the performance of small modular reactors. They found that the algorithm could rapidly learn about the physics behind a measurement of how steadily the reactor is producing power and predict changes in this indicator over time with 99% accuracy.
