BEHIND THICK security doors in a windowless basement at Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus sits Indiana’s only atomic reactor. Commissioned in 1962, it’s both an artifact from a long-gone era and (possibly) a harbinger of a nuclear power renaissance.
One that Indiana might help lead.
Compared to the hulking power stations once typically associated with nukes, the PUR-1 (short for Purdue University Reactor Number One) seems impossibly petite. Its “core” is 2 by 2 by 2 feet of fissile material submerged in a deep pool of eerily glowing water. Curious visitors—both students and tour groups—can peer straight down into the heart of the machine via a circular opening that faintly resembles a wishing well.
“It’s an open pool reactor, so you can actually see the core,” says Stylianos Chatzidakis, assistant professor at Purdue’s School of Nuclear Engineering and associate director of PUR-1. “It’s one of the very few reactors in the country where you can do that. It’s very useful for our students because they get to see the science in practice.” The machine generates an anemic 10 kilowatts of electricity—just enough to power three, maybe four, microwaves. But that’s all it needs to fulfill its role as a teaching and research tool.
The 63-year-old reactor was born during the false dawn of nuclear energy, when supporters believed the technology would produce electricity so cheap it wouldn’t be worth the bother to meter it. And it kept humming throughout the nukes-are-the-devil era of the 1980s and ’90s, when public backlash over the Three Mile Island incident and the Chernobyl disaster folded the entire industry.
By the close of the last century, fears about everything from accidents to improper waste disposal put the kibosh on domestic atomic energy development. Indeed, the state of Indiana’s only attempt at building a reactor, the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Station in Jefferson County, was abandoned in 1984 after $2.5 billion had already been spent. All around the U.S., funding dried up, reactors were mothballed, and students stopped enrolling in nuclear engineering programs. Until now.
“At Purdue, we haven’t seen this level of interest in nuclear engineering in 30 or 40 years,” Chatzidakis says. “From 2021 to 2025, our enrollment has almost doubled.” Today Purdue’s program counts more than 200 undergrad and grad students combined. That’s a remarkable rebound for a field many considered moribund. And it’s not just Purdue. Across the country, nuclear engineering departments are seeing similar enrollment spikes. Thank the development of massive AI computing centers, which suck up an unspeakable amount of electricity, for the technology’s revival. And also the fact that, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events, nuclear power is now seen in some circles as green.
“One of the strongest drivers is the younger generation’s focus on clean energy,” Chatzidakis says. “They grew up without all this fearmongering from the ’80s and ’90s. They want energy security and sustainability. They come here because they want to contribute to a cleaner future.”
And, perhaps, a less sweltering one. Nuclear power doesn’t add one bit of CO2 to the atmosphere, making it as benign (in climate change context, at least) as solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy. And boy oh boy, can it belch out the megawatts. That’s music to the ears of the companies building the sprawling data centers to power ChatGPT and similar enterprises. To get the juice necessary to keep their AI systems humming, they’re investing in new nuclear energy companies and also bringing old nuclear plants back online—including the infamous Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest from the data center and AI communities,” Chatzidakis says. “If you want to build a 2,000-megawatt data center in Indiana, renewables are great, but you’d have to cover most of the state in wind turbines to make it work. Instead, you can have a nuclear reactor next to the data center providing that power supply.”
All of this is to say that Purdue’s nuclear program is (metaphorically) blowing up, and its half-century-old teaching reactor has moved from a relic to a showpiece for research, training, and technology development. Indeed, one of the school’s flagship innovations is the creation of “digital twin” technology for good ole PUR-1. “We collect all the data from the reactor in real time, send it to another building, and run it through high-fidelity models,” Chatzidakis explains. “That lets us predict what’s going to happen in the next minute or the next hour. We can detect anomalies. We can even simulate cyberattacks—safely—without touching the real reactor.” Think of it as a hyper-detailed, real-time simulation of the reactor, fed by live data culled from PUR-1’s fully digital control systems. This capability matters because, judging from where research grants and entrepreneurial businesses are headed these days, our nuclear future isn’t about building gigantic, 1970s-era plants. Instead, there’s lots of interest in designing smaller, more advanced power units called small modular reactors, or SMRs. Unlike old-school nuclear complexes, which can take a decade or more to complete, SMRs are designed to be made in factories, shipped to the power station, and integrated on-site. In the most simplistic terms, it would be like dropping a battery into a flashlight.
Purdue is leading a $6 million Department of Energy initiative to study ways to utilize advanced materials, improve safety systems, and reduce costs of SMRs. The school’s participation in this and other projects both wires its students into high-demand careers and also gives Indiana a front-row seat for the technology’s revival. That’s a rather odd spot for the Hoosier state, since aside from PUR-1’s miniscule output, we get not a single watt from nuclear power. At least not so far. State lawmakers recently passed legislation to encourage “coal-to-nuclear” conversions, making it easier for utilities to replace retiring coal-fired power plants with SMRs. “Indiana has lots of retired or retiring coal plants,” Chatzidakis says. “You already have the land, the transmission lines, the workforce. Instead of shutting everything down, you put a small modular reactor there. It saves money, saves jobs, and keeps the community intact.”
Purdue helped fund a state feasibility study identifying at least eight promising Indiana sites for future SMRs. None of these places may ever see a nuclear reactor, but the fact the option is even on the table signals a shift. The same state that pulled the plug on Marble Hill, even after spending billions on the project, seems ready to at least entertain the idea that fission is back in fashion.
But while public skepticism and resistance have markedly waned, they haven’t disappeared. “The anti-nuclear movement is not what it used to be,” Chatzidakis says. “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, misinformation was more easily believed. Today, people can fact-check. They see that modern reactors have multiple safety systems. They realize there hasn’t been a major U.S. nuclear accident in more than 40 years.”
Perhaps. But questions about waste and waste disposal are still being asked. “People picture glowing green barrels from The Simpsons,” Chatzidakis says. “That’s not reality. Spent nuclear fuel is solid, small in volume, and stored safely. If you took all the spent fuel from 100 U.S. reactors over 50 years, it wouldn’t even fill a single Walmart.”
Finland and Sweden are already building long-term waste repositories. In the U.S., the politics are messier. The once-planned Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada remains stalled, blocked by state resistance. But the Department of Energy is also pursuing “consent-based storage,” negotiating with willing communities about how and where to store nuclear waste.
Chatzidakis sees the revival of interest in nuclear power as far more than just academic. As countries including China rapidly expand their nuclear footprints, there’s a growing urgency, at least in some circles, for the United States to keep pace. “Other countries have built 70 reactors that are either under construction or planned,” he says. “In China, they’re building large ones in less than four years. For us, it took 10 years to build the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia [America’s newest nuclear reactor complex]. If we fall behind, we lose not just energy security but also the technological edge.”
PUR-1, in addition to its primary role as a teaching tool, serves as an ambassador of sorts for nuclear technology. More than 2,000 visitors, from high school students to curious locals, tour the facility each year. For guests who descend into the reactor room, staring down at the PUR-1’s glowing blue heart, the next nuclear age doesn’t feel theoretical at all. It feels like it’s already begun. “People come to visit the reactor, and they realize it’s not something to fear,” Chatzidakis says. “Once you understand how it works, it makes sense right away.”
