Stylianos Chatzidakis

Stories

Purdue and federal lab remotely control nuclear reactor power in real time for first time in U.S.

As of September 2026: Leading the digital twin and autonomous control research at Purdue

Engineers at Purdue University and Idaho National Laboratory remotely adjusted the power of a working research reactor in real time, without anyone touching a control rod on site. The demonstration used an automatic digital control loop, then a reinforcement learning model, linking high-performance computers in Idaho, the reactor in Indiana, and a Microsoft Azure cloud in Virginia.

Updated Sep 24