Timing is Everything

Sequoyah Engineer Meets Challenges Head-On

Duke Dang, an engineer with the Fix-It-Now team at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant, knows that every moment matters.

He and his team are responsible for addressing emergent issues that come up in the plant, designing temporary modifications to repair components between outages.

“At any time, any one of the thousands of components in the plant could enter a limited condition of operation,” Dang said, explaining the parameters that point toward operational excellence. “Reliability is the key to our success.”

In his day-to-day work, Dang knows timing is everything. He also knows timing is what got him here in the first place.

In 1975, when the fall of Saigon signaled the inevitable collapse of the South Vietnamese government, civilians began a mass evacuation. Six-year-old Duke Dang was one of those people.

“I remember the day we escaped,” Dang said, retelling a pivotal moment in his childhood. “I was waiting for my mom to come back from running errands when my aunt came by and asked if I wanted to go to the market with her. Just as we were leaving, my mom pulled up and stopped her.

“The sad thing is not even my mom’s family could know we were leaving. Even years later, the family left in Vietnam would cry when they told that story. The emotional aftermath of waking up and wondering where we were – that was hard, but we couldn’t risk getting caught.”

Just a few minutes delayed, and Dang’s family may have had to leave without him.

He looks back and marvels at moments like this that steered his destiny. Leaving Vietnam wasn’t the only one.

When he was a senior in college, Dang happened to run into a friend on the drill field at Mississippi State University who told him about some open interviews with TVA. He got the job and has been growing his career at TVA ever since.

It’s the mission that keeps Dang here.

“I always try to look at things from the public’s perspective,” he said. “There's an expectation that electricity is always available. We must fulfill our end of the bargain in providing that reliable power.”

No matter the repair, Dang and his team are prepared to determine the cause and put together a package to fix it. Although mitigating emergent issues is part of the job, being proactive is the ultimate goal.

“We’ve mostly been working on preventative modifications,” Dang said.

He described the concept of a single point of vulnerability, a critical part of a system that, if compromised, could disrupt important functions.

“If you are dependent on this one component, and its failure could directly cause a trip, you have to eliminate the issue by providing a redundancy, an upgrade or a bridging strategy.”

For example, Dang and his team added temporary fans to an electric board room when one of two air conditioning units was being repaired. That single AC unit remaining meant that some extra precautions needed to be taken.

It’s all about being prepared and using reflection as a path toward improvement.

“I take my perspective and my journey with me daily,” Dang said. “I’m so appreciative of where I am. In Vietnamese culture, we believe that if you are meant to do something, you’ll do it."

Fate is what is meant to be. But self-determination is how you continue to shape it.

Dang is meeting destiny halfway by building a better tomorrow for the place he calls home.