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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.
Thomas A. Chadwick, M. B. Chadwick
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages S356-S373
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1903300
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944, Robert Christy, working in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design of the nuclear core in Fat Man. While scientists originally intended to use a hollow sphere of plutonium, this design entailed substantial risk due to the likelihood of asymmetries resulting from implosion. Christy proposed changing the design to a solid sphere of plutonium with a modulated neutron source, and the design was eventually adopted, tested at Trinity, and used in the attack on Nagasaki. While there is no question regarding the important role that Christy played in demonstrating its feasibility as a reliable design, there is a debate as to who initially proposed the idea; though most sources have attributed this invention to Christy, some historical sources have attributed credit to Christy’s group leader, Rudolf Peierls, or indeed other scientists. This paper seeks to outline and resolve this dispute. We present new unclassified evidence extracted from previously unavailable sources (to unclassified audiences) from the National Security Research Center archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This evidence consists of 1945–1946 patent documentation, oral history interview tapes of Christy and Peierls, and monthly 1944 progress reports from the Theoretical Division. Though Christy and Peierls share joint credit on the patent, both Christy’s and Peierls’ words and writings, together with sources from Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, support the traditional view that Christy was indeed the originator of the idea. While Christy does deserve the majority of the credit for the invention and design, we acknowledge the important role Peierls and von Neumann played in its development.