Word: labs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Among the obvious joys are splendid skiing, fishing, riding just minutes away. But to an outside visitor Los Alamos seems uneasy, an unnatural civic transplant of 19,500 souls, where a man is known, or unknown, by the sensitized badge he wears. Directly or indirectly, the Los Alamos Scientific Lab still employs everybody in town...
Fully half of the Lab's $385 million appropriation is spent on weapons development, and the nocturnal thuds of high explosives testing tend to be reassuring rather than disruptive of sleep. Nuclear devices designed at the Lab end up as the heart of MIRV warheads in Minuteman missiles. The new Trident missile will carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There...
Technical excellence has been bought at a social price. The remoteness and boredom frustrate the wives who accompanied their husbands up the hill. "They're overeducated for the kind of life they lead," says Lab Staff Psychologist Frances Menlove. The sense of hush-hush urgency that still dominates the work of the Lab spills over into the social life. Gossip rains down like radioactive dust. Status symbols are precise and demanding, though in Los Alamos as in places like Cambridge, Mass., class is projected through such things as battered cars and withered clothes. Nuclear families here "are headed...
...spokesman for the forensics lab yesterday declined comment
FEDERAL EPA officials, naturally, have demanded an explanation for this insubordination. One regional official expressed an "extreme reluctance" to expose his employees to the dangerous chemicals in the dumpsites. Another employee complained of "a large backlog of work" and lack of manpower and lab facilities. And a third official--this one a regional director--stressed that "it is important to pursue (only) cases that the agency can win" in court and ignore the less blatant violations of environmental laws...