Due to the high safety performance of small nuclear reactors, there is a promising future for small reactors. Nuclear heating reactor (NHR) is a small reactor that has many advanced safety features such as the integrated arrangement, natural circulation at any power levels, self-pressurization, hydraulic control rod driving, and passive residual heating removing and can be applied to the fields of district heating, seawater desalination, and electricity production. Since the NHR dynamics has strong nonlinearity and uncertainty, it is meaningful to develop the nonlinear adaptive power-level control technique. From the idea of physically based control design method, a novel nonlinear adaptive power-level control is given for the NHR in this paper. It is theoretically proved that this newly built controller does not only provide globally asymptotic closed-loop stability but is also adaptive to the system uncertainty. Numerical simulation results show the feasibility of this controller and the relationship between the performance and controller parameters. 1. Introduction Due to the serious climate and environment problems such as global warming that caused by those greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels, it is significant for people to develop clean energy. Nuclear energy is one of the most rapidly developing clean energy, which gives the current rebirth of nuclear energy industry. After the severe Fukushima nuclear accident, much more attention has to be drawn on safety issues of nuclear plants. In contrast to those large nuclear reactors, small reactors usually has low power density which leads to higher safety performance and can be built near big cities for district heating, seawater desalination, and electricity production. Nuclear heating reactor (NHR) is a kind of small light water reactor, and the design of the NHR in China started since early 1980s. The first NHR of China, that is, the 5？MWth test nuclear heating reactor (NHR-5) began to be built in the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University in March 1986 and reached its full power operation on December 16, 1989 [1–4]. Based on NHR-5, INET also designed the 200？MWth nuclear heating reactor NHR-200 which inherits many advanced safety characteristics from NHR-5 such as integrated arrangement, natural circulation at any operating power levels, self-pressurized performance, hydraulic control rod driver, and passive residual heat removing [5]. Both structure and cross-section of the NHR-200 are shown in Figure 1. As an improvement of the NHR-5, the
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