Word: stuffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
David Loya, a lab technician, holds up a sheet of copper (90? 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...
...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? 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...
...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...
...down-home sass and straightforward irreverence. "There was really nothing outstanding about Jimmy as a boy," she once said of her successful firstborn, contending that Daughter Gloria, two years younger, was actually the smartest of her brood. And in 1976 she admonished her candidate-son Jimmy to "quit that stuff about never telling a lie." Lillian Carter, who died of cancer last week at 85, was never inhibited by her role as First Mother. That strength and independence made her one of the nation's best-loved matriarchs...