The conference program will be posted in March 2025, after completion of the submission reviews.
In the meantime, enjoy Dr. Reader's 2024 keynote, which features the importance of smiling as the end of the world is NOT imminent! Hopefully!
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Graham Reader
BA, BTech (Hons), PhD, psc, FEC, PEng, CEng, CMarE, Eur Ing, FIMarEst
Sustain What? For Who?
From harnessing the power of human and animal muscles and burning wood to steam-driven and nuclear energy, ingenious people continue to find ways to produce more power for their communities’ needs and activities. However, to save the planet and all living things from potentially calamitous ecological harm, there are legislative decisions being made to stop generating power from environmentally unsound energy sources. These include, but are not limited to, sources that can damage the geological structure of the Earth, involve the formation of hazardous, radioactive wastes, or whose use produces carbon emissions. Moreover, in many cases, such sources cannot be renewed and so, as their availability diminishes, alternatives will be needed to meet the energy demands of future generations. Energy and power play crucial roles in the provision of the basic necessities of life, such as breathable air, nutritious food, clean water, and adequate housing. If these essentials are to be enjoyed by all people, they need to be affordable. Can all these needs be met and sustained in the near future and for subsequent generations? A modest goal may be the adoption of the Haudenosaunee principle by which decisions made today should result in a sustainable future for the next seven generations. But it appears that the decisions made seven generations ago, at the start of the modern industrial period, have led, probably inadvertently, to the ostensibly grim environmental and climate issues of today. Can the drastic mistakes made then be corrected now for future generations by using power generated from sustainable external energy sources and celestial phenomena over which we have no direct influence other than the methods of conversion?
Dr. Hossam A. Gabbar
P.Eng., Fellow IET (FIET), Distinguished Lecturer IEEE NPSS, Director of Smart Energy Systems Lab (SESL), Director of Advanced Plasma Engineering Lab (APEL), Dept. of Energy and Nuclear Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Ontario Tech University, Canada.
Resilient Nuclear-Renewable Hybrid Energy Systems
This talk will present the integration of nuclear-renewable integrated systems to support energy infrastructure. Different coupling mechanisms will be presented to support different installations and user requirements. Design and operation strategies and various technologies will be illustrated to deploy nuclear-renewable hybrid energy systems and their use for different applications in city, urban, and remote communities. Performance measures are proposed to evaluate different strategies. The talk will include a techno-economic evaluation of interconnected nuclear-renewable micro hybrid energy systems with combined heat and power and their impact on a number of implementation strategies. Strategies will be illustrated for deploying a nuclear-renewable hybrid energy system (N-R HES), with considerations on scalability, capital cost, project lifetime, and other implementation parameters. Nuclear technologies will be presented, including Small Modular Reactors (SMR) or Micro Modular Reactors (MMR), as integrated within microenergy grids. Resiliency and performance measures will be discussed in view of a number of operation and control strategies to meet user requirements.