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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.
David Weitzel, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico), Michael Short (MIT), Michael Laufer (Kairos Power), Sam Sham (ANL)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1176-1182
Much progress has recently been made on Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) technology with the strategic support of the Department of Energy (DOE). However, concerns regarding the structural material’s compatibility with the salt have hampered the detailed design and evaluation of reliability and economics. Existing research also neglects fluid flow when measuring alloy dissolution. FLiBe flow affects species diffusion through the salt and in turn modifies the reaction kinetics at the alloy surface. Without a proper understanding of the flow effects on alloy dissolution, MSR performance assessments will inevitably remain imprecise.
This research entails the construction of a subscale molten salt loop to test the effects of FLiBe flow on the corrosion rate of various alloys. Our test loop will consist of a molten salt pump connected to a bimetallic composite test loop with a sample holder for the tested alloys. The salt temperature and velocity can be varied independently to replicate the varied operating conditions in the MSR and better characterize the effects of FLiBe flow on corrosion. Investigating the effects of salt flow on alloy element dissolution will advance material choice for key reactor components. These findings will enable nuclear engineers to create more detailed and accurate plant designs.