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The Nuclear Electrical Engineer

An educational resource for electrical engineers in the nuclear power industry

Here you can find design tips on technical skills like cable and breaker sizing, short-circuit evaluations and more, PLUS deep-dive analysis of nuclear-specific topics like design basis, Tech Specs, UFSARs, and safety-related SSCs — built from primary source documents.

The Engineer's Life · Feature

First Outage: Hatch, February 2017

John Livingston
August 15, 2026 · 2 min read

From Tips of the Week, 25 February and 8 April 2017. My first outage was at Plant Hatch in February 2017, and it was also my first go at working the night shift. Five in the evening to five in the morning…

To prepare, I did the only sensible thing: I asked people who had done it before.

Adjusting to nights

The advice I got back matched this article almost point for point, which is a decent sign that it’s the right advice. It was good advice.

What surprised me was how quickly the body gives in. After the first night it wasn’t too hard to adjust.

Coming off nights turned out to be the part worth planning. My method: on the day my shift ended, I took a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Then I went to sleep at the normal hour that evening and got up at the normal time the next morning. One deliberate nap and a hard reset, rather than trying to sleep off twelve hours of accumulated night.

It worked. I’ve used it every outage since.

Leaders teach

That February, Hatch Unit 2 completed what was then a Southern Nuclear fleet record for shortest refuelling outage. A few weeks later I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation by the Vice President of Plant Hatch, David Vineyard.

His topic was leadership — specifically, how to become a leader who can effectively direct a team and accomplish objectives. With competition from natural gas, the Nuclear Promise initiative to cut costs, and the Westinghouse bankruptcy fresh at the time, it was not an abstract subject.

One thing he said stood out, and I’ve carried it since.

He described a situation familiar to every leader: doing a subordinate’s task yourself because you can do it better.

His point was that instead of taking the task away and doing it yourself, you should make it a prerogative to teach them how to do it.

Leaders teach.

Teaching your staff means trusting them to be able to learn from you. They must also be willing to learn. Take the extra time to invest in them. When they learn to do the task to your standards, you have increased the division of labor — and they have gained a skill that makes them more valuable and more confident.

You will also have freed yourself from a burden of your own.

Everybody profits.