Not saying you don’t know this already, but just throwing in additional context/info:

Hanford… isn’t/wasn’t… the kind of nuclear power plant that is primarily geared toward the generation of energy. It actually required a significant amount of energy, they had to build a new substation for it, drawing off of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams.

It was built as part of the Manhattan project.

To refine or transform Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239.

Hanford produced the plutonium used in the Trinity test bomb, and in the Fat Man bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

It kept producing weapons grade nuclear material through till about the mid 60s, then mostly ceased that kind of operation and functioned as varying kinds of test nuclear reactors and also was used for other scientific studies.

More recently, one of the LIGO, gravity wave detectors, was built and operated there.

… But, it also serves as a nuclear waste storage site… and has had a whole lot of problems of leaking said nuclear waste into the ground water table over the last several decades, a good amount of which was making its way into the Columbia river, at one point.

As of 2023, apparently 10k people are/were employed in cleanup efforts… it is a Superfund site, a special program Congress came up with a while back to address egregious toxic waste sites across the country.

… And the entire site was built on land sacred to multiple Native America tribes, many of whom were relocated… It is located basically on / near where the Snake, Yakima and Columbia rivers meet, and has… had been continuously inhabited by native peoples for thousands of years, and functioned as a place of meeting between the Nez Perce, Umatilla and Yakama peoples.

So… yeah. Took a sacred historical site and quite literally turned it into a nuclear waste dump.

I don’t know much about nuclear plants either but I do know a bit about wires and I think you are correct. It’s very unlikely that one of these cables just snaps, look how they twisted the wires in that ‘arm’ so it can move and bend forming a nice elbow. So if it’s corrosion, temperature, mechanical shock… it could affect other cables as well making advisable to replace the whole bunch altogether.

That said I’ve seen a very similar looking wiring, though very different machine, an electronic organ from the 60s. Among other issues there were some dead keys on one of the keyboards and the problem was the wires. I just ran a new bunch with an exactly looking cable, laced it the same way as the other bunches, and put it kind of hidden between them. It didn’t stand out at all, most people would not notice at all.

That sounds fun. Looking at the picture again I feel like over time eventually the stress of opening and closing the panel would weaken something at least. Although tbf maybe it’s rarely opened

There was a Schlock Mercenary one the other day, it’s getting wild in here

You mean the clearly legible text? lol

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