CERN engineers have to identify and remove 9k old cables

Jan 28, 2016 4 Replies

Thought this made a nice counterpoint to the recent threads about neat- to-the-point-of-OCD network cabling.



"CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world?s largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there?s no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC.



In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator?s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them"



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When I was on a course there in 1970, I went in one of the proton syncrotron detector "labs" where the floor was covered in places to a depth of a foot or so in cables. They told me then that they periodically chop them all out and start again.

I worked in a studio/office building in London that had just changed hands. The new owners took all the computer flooring up then had blokes cutting through cables with a stihlsaw and putting huge bundles into one of those tubes down the side of the building that ends in a skip.

Same place, I opened a big cupboard door and it was full of sacks of unopened mail from viewers.

Bill

Which building as that? or, roughtly where?

That always used to be standard practice on Navy ships. By the time a ship was a decade or two old, it would be carrying several tons of disused cable.

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