Join the 7x24 Exchange Oregon Chapter for our First virtual event!

We are lucky enough to have Steve Fairfax, a speaker from the Fall International Conference, to present Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima: Lessons for the Data Center Industry

Wednesday, May 27th

3:00 PM- 4:00 PM

 Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and         Fukushima: Lessons for the Data Center   Industry 

Steve Fairfax- President of MTechnology, Inc.

The events at Three Mile Island (TMI) essentially shut down expansion of a rapidly growing US nuclear power industry for 40 years. Chernobyl resulted in multiple fatalities among operating personnel and those responding to the accident. It caused contamination of a wide area that is cordoned off to this day. Fukushima added to the already immense tragedy of a massive earthquake and tsunami that killed over fifteen thousand people.  In this session Steve will discuss the errors in maintenance, testing, and value engineering that led to the three events. Management oversight and policies are implicated in all three. None of these failures were due to malicious acts. All involved personnel were motivated by the best of intentions, but operating within systems of perverse incentives and inadequate supervision. These accidents were preventable.  Disturbingly similar self-inflicted injuries are the bane of data center uptime. No data center performs as well as its designers intended. Excessive maintenance, limited use of reliability design standards, and limited recognition of risk in operational decisions are nearly universal.  Our society’s increasing reliance on data centers for life and safety-critical services threaten to produce the data center industry’s equivalent of the TMI crisis. People hurt or killed because of a data center failure leads inevitably to close scrutiny by the press, public, attorneys, regulators, and political actors. Over-reaction and regulation by temper tantrum are nearly inevitable. Curtailment of a rapidly growing large industry has happened before and could happen again.  There are ways out of this trap, but it requires a level of cooperation and mutual awareness of our shared fate that is lacking at this time. After TMI the US nuclear industry reformed itself and now boasts a truly impressive safety and operational record. With commitment and hard work, the data center industry can do the same before disaster strikes.

Please register to receive webinar dial in information

Email krose@7x24exchange.org for additional information or questions.