(3 of 3)
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."
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¢ 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