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John Livingston's

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

What an Outage Teaches You About Your Own Designs

John Livingston
September 12, 2026 · 2 min read

From Tip of the Week, 22 February 2020, with a practical note from 24 October 2020. Here I am again, working the night shift at a plant outage.

If you ever get to serve at an outage, it provides ample opportunities to gain practical experience that you won’t normally get working from the office. This experience can improve your future designs.

For example…

Material considerations

Sometimes, things break. You need spares. This is crucial during an outage. Sometimes even insignificant cables provided on vendor equipment fail, perhaps because of water intrusion which no one could have predicted. This can begin a scramble for a replacement. Including spares during the design phase can avoid this.

Labeling

Equipment labels are important for making sure the craft can easily identify where their cables need to terminate. It may be an afterthought during the design but can become a serious consideration during implementation. Inadequate or confusing labeling can create error traps that may show up during testing and result in rework.

Conductor labels

If conductors aren’t labeled on drawings, this can impede the redlining process. The craft needs to be able to verify their physical work against the drawings. So wire labels or colors become crucial.

Schematic and wiring diagrams

During troubleshooting, it will become clear to you just how important a schematic or elementary diagram is to quickly understanding a circuit and identifying where the issues could be. Then, wiring diagrams are crucial for putting together troubleshooting plans and pointing the craft to specific terminal blocks to check for voltage or continuity to confirm your suspicions and start systematically ruling out possibilities.

Lastly, while at an outage, take the opportunity to get out in the field and see what’s going on. Observe the construction and implementation process. Watch how the craft does their work. Look into panels, observe cable color schemes and separation.

This is a great opportunity to see what would otherwise be lines and diagrams on paper come to life in 3D.

One last practical note

Get safety shoes with a carbon fibre toe rather than steel. You will get through security faster because you won’t have to stop and take them off every time.