GPPS Hong Kong23: Plenary Keynote Speaker
Keynote Title:
Nuclear Power as a Sustainable Energy Option
Abstract:
Natural disasters due to extreme weather, such as floods and forest fires, around the world signals the global warming effect due to the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Nuclear power with its low carbon nature will play a significant role for carbon neutrality in 2050-2060. Nuclear power from the fission of heavy nuclides, such as uranium 235 and plutonium 239, with neutrons can be nearly sustainable if the closed fuel cycle, which recycles the fissile fuels converted in the spent fuels, is adopted based on the next generation nuclear power technology. On the other hand, there are also active international programs, such as JET and ITER, working on sustainable power through the fusion reactions of light nuclides, such as deuterium and tritium. Such fusion reactions actually take place in our sun, which is source of renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydro power. One of the engineering challenges of fusion power reactors is the cooling of the first wall of a Tokamak fusion reactor. The counter flow diverging microchannels heat sink recently developed in our laboratory may dissipate heat flux as high as 1000 W/cm2 and have the potential to be employed to cool the first wall and eventually converted heat into electricity.
Prof. Chin Pan
Prof. PAN Chin is now CLP Power chair professor of nuclear engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong. He received his BS degree in nuclear engineering from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in 1979, MS and PhD degrees in nuclear engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1983 and 1986, respectively.
After receiving his doctoral degree, Prof. Pan served as visiting research assistant professor at UIUC before joining NTHU as associate professor in 1986 and promoted to full professor in 1990. He served as Chairman of the Department of Engineering and System Science of NTHU from February 2001 to January 2004 and Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research from December 2003 to July 2008. Prof. Pan was Dean of College of Nuclear Science from August 2005 to July 2011. He served as Convener of the Energy Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology from January 2014 to December 2016. He was President of Chung-Hwa Nuclear Society from January 2012 to January 2018. He has joined the City University of Hong Kong since February 2018.
Prof. Pan’s research activities for the past two decades have been in the general areas of multi-phase flow and boiling heat transfer.
He published a book in Chinese entitled “Boiling Heat Transfer and Two-phase Flow” in 2001. He has authored and co-authored more than 110 journal papers and 130 conference papers or presentations.
He was awarded an outstanding research award in 1998 and 3 excellent research awards earlier from the National Science Council (now Ministry of Science and Technology) of Taiwan. Prof. Pan received the first-grade service medal and certificate from the Executive Yuan of Taiwan for his excellent service in National Tsing Hua University for more than thirty years in November 2018.
Prof. Chin Pan
CLP Power chair professor of nuclear engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong
