A fuel truck backed into a pole in Vogtle’s switchyard and cut all safety power to a reactor in the middle of a refueling outage. For 36 minutes, nothing was cooling it. The truck was the trigger. The danger was what the plant looked like when the truck arrived.
The years just before and after retirement are built the same way: margin at its thinnest, backups quietly out of service, one path carrying everything. I can’t tell you when the truck backs up. I can tell you what your plant looks like when it does.
See the boardEvery line on the left comes from the NRC’s record of that morning. Every line on the right is something I see in retirement plans. Nobody at Vogtle did anything reckless, and neither do most retirees. Each condition was reasonable on its own. Together they left no room for one more failure.
Coolant drained to “mid-loop” for maintenance: the least water the plant ever runs with, and so the least time before decay heat becomes a problem.
The first years of withdrawals. The paycheck has stopped, the draws have started, and a market drop now does damage that a later recovery doesn’t undo.
A single reserve transformer feeding both of Unit 1’s safety buses. One pole, one line, everything behind it.
One company behind the paycheck, the pension, and the largest holding in the account, or one assumption behind the whole income plan.
One of the two emergency diesel generators and the second reserve transformer were down for scheduled maintenance.
No cash reserve outside the market, so the first bad year means selling stock at a loss to pay the bills.
The surviving diesel started, then tripped after about 70 seconds on a faulty sensor, one that had failed 69 times since 1985.
The warning that has been on every statement for years: the concentration, the withdrawal plan nobody has stress-tested. Tolerated because nothing has gone wrong yet.
A fuel truck, rear view blocked, backing into a support pole for a 230-kV line.
The market event nobody schedules. It doesn’t need to be large. It only needs to arrive while rows one through four are true.
The plant column is drawn from the NRC and contemporary sources listed at the foot of this page. The retirement column is my own reading of patterns I see in client plans, not a statistic.
A security escort rode along with the driver that morning. His job was to watch one man and one vehicle. He watched the truck back into the pole. Watching the trigger is not the same as seeing the risk.
Checking the balance, reading the headlines, reacting to the market’s day. It feels like vigilance. It sees the trigger only once it is already happening, and by then the configuration has decided the outcome.
After 1990 the NRC stopped treating outages as the safe part of a plant’s life. It began asking whether each outage configuration could survive one more failure, and its inspectors now check that switchyard work matches the plant’s outage risk plan.
That is the review I do for a retirement: not which day the market falls, but whether your plan survives it on any day.
When withdrawals begin, how many years of spending sit outside the stock market, and what has to happen before you touch the rest?
How much of your income, pension, and savings traces back to one employer, one fund, or one assumption about the future?
Which backup are you counting on that isn’t really there: a reserve that was spent, a second income that ended, an expense you assume you can cut?
Which warning has shown up on every statement and every review, and never been acted on?
If the market falls hard in the year you retire, what happens next, and is the answer written down before it happens?
Nobody at Vogtle scheduled the truck. Somebody scheduled the outage.
I think we are living through historic times, and I believe the reset ahead will be the largest any of us has lived through. I won’t put a date on it, and I don’t trust anyone who does. Nobody at Vogtle could have named the morning a truck would back into that pole.
What I can do is what the industry learned to do after 1990: look at the configuration before the outage, not after the trigger. Very few of the retirement plans I see are ready for one more failure, and most of the people who own them have no idea, because nothing has gone wrong yet.
The fixes are rarely dramatic. A reserve built before it’s needed. One path turned into two. A warning finally acted on. They are cheap to make before the truck arrives and impossible to make in the 36 minutes after.
A review starts with one conversation about where your income, pension, and savings actually come from, and what happens if one of them fails on a bad day.
Start the conversationBailey Financial Services, Inc. is a state-registered investment adviser. This page is educational and is not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice. Any recommendation depends on a review of your full circumstances.
The account of the March 20, 1990 event at Vogtle Unit 1 is summarized from the public NRC records and contemporary reporting listed above; timings and temperatures are as reported in those sources. The comparison between a nuclear plant outage and a retirement is the author’s own analogy, offered to illustrate risk concepts. It is not a technical finding, and the retirement column of the board reflects the author’s judgment rather than any study or statistic.
Nothing on this page is a forecast of when any market decline will occur or how large it will be. No review can identify every risk, and identifying a risk does not guarantee a better outcome. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.
Bailey Financial Services is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Georgia Power, Southern Company, Southern Nuclear, the co-owners of Plant Vogtle, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the Union of Concerned Scientists. References to these organizations are for historical context only.