Bulk reduction of reactor power within a small finite time interval under abnormal conditions is referred to as step-back. In this paper, a 500 MWe Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) type Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR) is modeled using few variants of Least Square Estimator (LSE) from practical test data under a control rod drop scenario in order to design a control system to achieve a dead-beat response during a stepped reduction of its global power. A new fractional order (FO) model reduction technique is attempted which increases the parametric robustness of the control loop due to lesser modeling error and ensures iso-damped closed loop response with a PI ^λ D ^μ or FOPID controller. Such a controller can, therefore, be used to achieve active step-back under varying load conditions for which the system dynamics change significantly. For closed loop active control of the reduced FO reactor models, the PI ^λ D ^μ controller is shown to perform better than the classical integer order PID controllers and present operating Reactor Regulating System (RRS) due to its robustness against shift in system parameters.