Constellation has named Chris Mudrick as the company’s new chief nuclear officer, effective Sept. 29, 2025, according to a Sept. 4 news release.

Mudrick succeeds Dave Rhoades, who is retiring at the end of the year after serving in the role since 2021. Constellation owns the Byron Nuclear Plant.

“Dave Rhoades has left an indelible mark on our company and our industry, and his legacy of safety, reliability and error-free operations is unmatched,” said Joe Dominguez, Constellation president and CEO. “With decades of technical, operational and leadership experience, Chris Mudrick is uniquely qualified to succeed Dave, preserving and growing America’s largest nuclear fleet to power the nation and help win the AI race.”

Constellation’s clean energy centers have consistently shown strong operational performance with an industry leading capacity factor of more than 94% over the last decade, according to the release. Rhoades’ leadership was integral to achieving that high level of reliability.

“Dave’s contributions to our nuclear fleet are immeasurable,” said Bryan Hanson, Constellation’s chief generation officer. “Under his leadership, Constellation routinely led the industry in annual capacity factors and outage durations, two key indicators of reliability and error-free operations. Chris is well suited to follow Dave and his deep industry experience, both domestically and internationally, will help us maintain these high levels of operational excellence while delivering more clean megawatts to American homes and businesses.”

Constellation has experienced many operational innovations under Rhoades’ leadership, resulting in improved performance and capacity factors across the fleet. During his tenure, he has overseen efforts to digitalize equipment at Constellation clean energy centers and led the charge to shorten the duration of refueling outages. Outages frequently took over a month to complete years ago and Rhoades’ focus on safely streamlining activities and detailed planning has helped reduce the average timeframe to less than three weeks. Rhoades will retire at the end of this year after nearly 40 years of service to Constellation.

Mudrick has served as senior vice president of generation growth since returning to Constellation last year after serving the previous four years as chief nuclear officer at Bruce Power in Canada. Since rejoining Constellation, he has overseen the Crane Clean Energy Center restart and supported numerous growth and data economy initiatives. Mudrick spent more than 30 years in leadership positions at Constellation prior to joining Bruce Power.