Nuclear Engineering is considered to be highly intellectually challenging, exciting and vigorous discipline having variety of applications. The programme Nuclear Engineering and Technology in IIT Kanpur was established in 1974.

Nuclear Engineering has emerged as an important discipline and world is looking towards it, as a promising candidate to meet energy and other needs such as in security and medical applications. The research in fission and fusion is growing with new efforts towards the development of advance technologies.

The employment opportunities for the graduating students are in DAE and the private sector. The strong flavor of computational skills results in, and not surprisingly, some students joining the leading software companies. In the past four years, there is a resurgence of interest in pursuing higher studies. There is a very strong interaction of NET with the DAE. Scientists from BARC visit IITK regularly for participating in the courses related to nuclear power plants. Further, mechanical and nuclear engineering groups at IITK have received considerable amount of funding in form of sponsored projects in the area of nuclear power reactor safety analysis.