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Former Exelon CEO Chris Crane remembered for “transformational milestones”
Crane
Exelon announced that Chris Crane, the company’s former chief executive, passed away on Saturday in Chicago at the age of 65.
Crane served as the company’s president and CEO from 2012 until his retirement in December 2022. During his tenure, he steered the energy company through several transformational milestones, including the successful mergers with Constellation Energy in 2012 and Pepco Holdings in 2016, creating the largest utility business by customer count in the United States.
In 2022, with the spin-off of Constellation as the generation and retail side of energy business (with the largest U.S. nuclear fleet), Crane led the creation of a stand-alone transmission and delivery energy company.
Kazuhiro Sawa, Tsutomu Tobita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 3 | June 2003 | Pages 250-259
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3387
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In current high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), Tri-isotropic (TRISO)-coated fuel particles are employed as fuel. In safety design of the HTGR fuels, it is important to retain fission products within particles so that their release to primary coolant does not exceed an acceptable level. From this point of view, the basic design criteria for the fuel are to minimize the failure fraction of as-fabricated fuel coating layers and to prevent significant additional fuel failures during operation. The maximum burnup of the first-loading fuel of the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) is limited to 3.6%FIMA (% fission per initial metallic atom) to certify its integrity during the operation. In order to investigate fuel behavior under extended burnup condition, irradiation tests were performed. The irradiation was carried out as HRB-22 and 91F-1A capsule irradiation tests. The fuel for the irradiation tests was called extended burnup fuel, whose target burnup and fast neutron fluence were higher than those of the first-loading fuel of the HTTR. In order to keep fuel integrity up to over 5%FIMA, the thickness of buffer and SiC layers of fuel particle were increased. The fuel compacts were irradiated in the HRB-22 and the 91F-1A capsules at the High Flux Isotope Reactor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at the Japan Materials Testing Reactor of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, respectively. The comparison of measured and calculated release rate-to-birth rate ratios showed that there were additional failures in both irradiation tests. A pressure vessel failure model analysis showed that no tensile stresses acted on the SiC layers even at the end of irradiation and no pressure vessel failure occurred in the intact particles even in a particle with thin buffer layer with failed OPyC layer. The presumed failure mechanisms are additional through-coatings failure of as-fabricated SiC-failed particles or an excessive increase of internal pressure by the accelerated irradiation. Further study is needed to clarify the failure mechanism.