In New Mexico: High-Tech Junkyard

By Jane O'Reilly

The salvage yard at Los Alamos is open from noon to 4 p.m. on Thursdays. The regulars start arriving early, staking out their positions at the head of the line, which by noon stretches across the parking lot. When the door opens, they trot forward, gaining speed as they gallop through the warehouse, swerve around the cash register and slide past a World War II-vintage sign of a cutout policeman holding up a warning DO NOT RUN OR PUSH. One by one they pop out into the yard, their shirts and hats festooned with bits of masking tape made into instant claim markers. SOLD: JDGL. The rule, only occasionally broken, is that the person who marks it first gets it. What they do with "it" after that is their problem. Sometimes the problem is figuring out what "it" is, among the refuse of the work of the lab, the source of the material on sale.

"It's a gamble," says SOLD: JDGL, who is Jim Lindsay, a retired physicist. His wife Jeanette, a retired schoolteacher, is reassuring: "It looks like a dogfight, but there is a lot of sharing too. People help each other." The Lindsays have been regulars for 20 years. The 12-ft. butcher-block counter they bought today for $50 will go under, or on, or behind the piles of salvage that fill their own basement and the basement in the house next door.

Salvage day is a social and psychological event in Los Alamos. Once upon a time, before Galileo changed everything, the people who are now seduced by salvage would have worn long, pointy sorcerers' hats and worried about perpetual-motion machines and the best way to turn lead into gold. Nowadays they call themselves scroungers and arrive for the weekly salvage ritual in white pickup trucks, wearing clothes suitable for labor in a wood lot. Many of them also wear Los Alamos National Laboratory security badges on their down vests and flannel shirts. Their reflexive tendency on being introduced, to reveal whether or not they have a Ph.D., hints that this is not just another junkyard.

This junkyard of high-tech effluvia is 7,500 ft. above sea level, occupying three acres of the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico. The Jemez Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range rise from the Rio Grande Valley, the gray-green slopes splashed with yellowing aspen. The incomparable clouds of the high desert float over the city on the hill. Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, is a 40-year-old company town (pop. 17,500). The company is the U.S. Government, and the main business is nuclear weapons. The lab's Bradbury Science Museum has all kinds of hands-on exhibits explaining peacetime uses of magnetically confined plasma, inertial fusion and lasers. But weapons are the cornerstone, accounting for more than half of this year's $517 million budget. Scarcely anyone would live on the hill if it were not for weapons.

In July a White House Science Council review of the quality of the work done at most of the major national laboratories, including Los Alamos, pointed out serious deficiencies. Last month the man who originally requested the review, the President's science adviser, Dr. George Key worth II, a former physics-division leader at the lab, warned the badge holders to prepare for changing times. The lab should "deeply think through its mission," he said in a speech at Los Alamos.

Keyworth objected to the press's use of the phrase Star Wars to describe what he called the President's new defensive concept. Admitting "the American people are not likely to enthusiastically support the placement of nuclear weapons in space," he urged the assembled scientists to start thinking instead about ways to get their share of the huge research-and-development money involved in putting laser beams in space. In Los Alamos, weapons are bread and butter.

Thirty-four miles southeast, the selfconsciously self-aware Anglos who live in Santa Fe like to talk reverently about "the energy that comes off the mountains." They mean spiritual, natural, ancestral energy, not the kind that could come off the high-tech Machu Picchu on the hill. In Los Alamos, the holistic weapons careerists in the cafeteria choose beansprouts and yogurt and reject actual nuclear war as theoretically implausible. It is downright rude in Los Alamos for an outsider--or even an insider--to raise questions concerning war or peace. The first causes moral qualm, the second unemployment.

Living on the edge of contradiction is not easy, even for people who like to describe themselves as high-performance professionals. A trip to the yard seems to offer a chance to domesticate some of that contradiction, to turn some small piece of it into something comprehensibly useful.

None of the stuff in the salvage yard is radioactive. It does not directly bear any functional relationship to an atomic bomb. The prices are dirt cheap, but it is not fair to view the yard as another glaring example of Government waste. Compared with the military, for example, the lab, which is managed by the University of California for the Department of Energy, is positively thrifty. Or so insists Allen Wallace, property disposal supervisor for the Zia Co., the contractor that serves, to use local parlance, as the interface between the lab and the outside world. Says Wallace: "It is important to understand this is the last step." Before this, usable surplus has been offered to other Government agencies through excess-property catalogues, and then to state and local agencies. Finally, it goes to the yard.

Five minutes after noon the scroungers have established territorial piles of gleanings. Inside a dumpster filled with old electronics (40-c- per lb.), three men are crawling around stripping out switches, relays and diodes. In the steel pile (7-c- per lb.), a swarm is hauling off a transformer cabinet, a 16-in. pipe and a chunk of plate steel left in fanciful cookie-cutter shapes by a plasma-arc cutter. Two men are momentarily baffled by a machined piece. "I don't know what they could have meant to do with this," says one. "It could have been a detector, something to let low-energy particles through. . ."

Rich Hassman, a computer-systems manager in the waste-management group, is taking apart some Unistrut metal framing with a socket wrench. "Right now," he says, "I'm thinking of using this as a base for a water bed. I like to make things. A friend of mine is building a 35-ft. steel ketch, and he turned me on to metal welding. So I got a Heliarc." A steel ketch? In New Mexico?

David Loya, a lab technician, holds up a sheet of copper (90-c- per lb.) and says to a friend: "Wow! Did you ever see the kitchen hood I built from this stuff?" Musing about copper planters, he stacks up a roll of Nalgene chemical-resistant plastic, and a couple of xenon flash tubes used to trigger ruby lasers. "It's fascinating what you can do with these," he gloats. "You can make a short-duration light-pulsing device." For fun? "Oh, yeah."

The biggest pile of all belongs to the legendary Ed Grothus, a former machinist who spent 20 years building "better" bombs ("Be sure to put in the quotes," he says). He has been coming to salvage for 25 years, and his business, the Los Alamos Sales Co., by now claims to offer the "world's most diversified stock of scientific equipment!" Grothus, 60, is the ultimate Los Alamos contradiction. He has collected five warehouses of salvage even as he has become vociferously more antinuclear, propeace and technodoubtful.

His acquisitions today--a helium-neon laser, a flow meter, some bookends, a Rolodex, a light table, a 3-ft.-tall thermos for liquid nitrogen, a massive pneumatically operated vacuum valve--will go into storage with the rest, waiting for a buyer. "I've got $20 million--that's Government cost, not mine--worth of stuff," says Grothus. "I'm looking for someone to sell it to for 10-c- on the dollar. I'm trying to sell it to the People's Republic of China. It's usable. It would fill the technical and scientific needs of a sizable developing nation."

In one warehouse, an A-framed former Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, Grothus points out things at random. "Boron-loaded polyethylene, a neutron absorber. Who the hell wants it? I've got twelve or so 400-channel analyzers. Stacks of nuclear-instrumentation modules. IBM card punches and readers--obsolete by our standards. But if a country has nothing? Scintillation crystals. Electronic balances." Grothus supplied the technical props for the Karen Silkwood movie. He was horrified when they were returned. "You can't get rid of this stuff," he moans. "Do you need a five-beam oscilloscope? Nobody on earth has as much stuff as I do, and I'm not sure technology has any value at all." He pauses to admire a high-speed camera that takes 1,000 frames a second. "You can watch dynamite explode. Wow! So what? Does it feed more people?" He edges around a high-voltage power supply. "This stuff is under reinforced concrete. If the Bomb goes, the little green men will find the largest time capsule in Los Alamos.'' --By Jane O'Reilly This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.