Education and research programs in the Institute of Nuclear Engineering and Science of National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan

Nuclear Engineering program was started in National Tsing Hua University more than 40 years ago, as the sole nuclear engineering department in Taiwan. It has graduated more than 3000 graduates since then. About 40% of them are still working in the nuclear fields in Taiwan and abroad. In the past ten years or so, due to the anti-nuclear environments and the current Government's policy, the enrolment of students has been very difficult. In 1997, the department decided to change to the current name to broaden the research areas into multi-discipline integrated systems including nuclear engineering as one part of the systems. Nevertheless, since the Kyoto Protocol has limited the emission of CO₂ and in conjunction with the scarce and rising price of fossil fuel, the need for nuclear energy in Taiwan becomes inevitable and necessary. This fact is reflected from Figure 1. It is seen that the numbers of undergraduate students taking nuclear related courses have been increasing over the past seven years. In order to restore a proper nuclear engineering program to train qualified graduate students for the foresee need in the nuclear energy industry, the University decided to form an institute to carry out this purpose. The Institute of Nuclear Engineering and Science will start the MS programs in 2007 and the PhD programs in 2009. The enrolments each year will be 15 and 5 students, respectively. The current research and teaching activities in nuclear related fields in the Department of Engineering and System Science will be transferred to the new institute. The main research areas in this institute will include the following four areas: (1) Nuclear Power Plant Engineering (2) Radiation Applications (3) Medical Physics (4) Radiochemistry In order to encourage students to join this program, the Taipower Company has established scholarships for those students with good records and promised to recruit them after their graduation. Furthermore, the research funding both from industry and from the National Science Council will be increased through teaming-up several professors to conduct integrated research projects. Examples are boron-captured-neutron therapy, nuclear power plant power uprating, plant life-extension, safety analysis and design, codes applications and assessments, neutron beam facility in SNS, nuclear waste managements, etc. We have had outstanding records in educating nuclear engineers and scientists in the past, now we are going to re-establish this new institute to continue the important task for Taiwan and the world.