My Los Alamos Experience

By K. C. Kim

This book describes the authors some 40 years of personal experiences at Los Alamos. The town of Los Alamos and the nations premier defense nuclear institution--Los Alamos National Laboratory, serve as the background for the authors perspectives in his long professional career in science and management. Although much has been documented and written about Los Alamos, this book tells a unique and intimate personal story in a story-telling genre. This book also makes a stride in helping the readers understand the importance of science for our future well-being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481713627

K. C. Kim

K. C. Kim, an accomplished scientist and science educator, held positions as a group leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and chief scientist in the Nuclear Materials Division. Throughout his professional career, he wrote and co-authored many scientific articles in prominent scientific journals. Recently, the author has also published his autobiography, “Rootless: A chronicle of my life journey”. During his retirement years he actively pursues diverse hobbies including scuba diving, stone sculpting, and painting.

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© 2013 by K. C. Kim. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/08/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1357-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1358-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1362-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902313

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover page photo description:

This photo of a glowing ball of plutonium oxide comes from one of the main posters prepared for the second international conference Plutonium Futures—The Science which was held in the year 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

How my family came to Los Alamos

The Road to Los Alamos

How I started my work

My personal life outside the Laboratory

From Jumper to Lippizan and nuclear materials and waste management

Management and beyond

NMT Chief Scientist

The rise and fall of a science town

My retirement years

Eight Days Memory Trip back to Korea

Night time stories to my next generation

Some relics from my Los Alamos work days and other communications

A Footnote

E-mails

In loving memory of my parents

Preface

I used to say in the past that the religious figure Buddha must have been a scientist as well ahead of his time when he told his followers that all living things are reincarnated. As we know now, all elements that make up our body and soul are preserved even after our death and reassembled in some form or another. I consider even one’s soul and one’s thought must be in some energy form, because there cannot be any soul or thought in total absence of energy. I even gave a name for our thought, thoughton (rhymed like photon), like any other fundamental entities—particles and waves alike—in the universe. When one looks at our human existence in this way, we might say that we existed in the past, surely exist today, and will exist in the future, albeit in different forms. I personally take comfort in knowing that my entity is forever in harmony with the nature.

The idea of the particle-like and wave-like world around us is expressed in my spring celebration in the following verse called Quantum Spring:

Quantum Spring

Spring emanates photons of colorful flowers,

The air is filled with songs of lively birds’ phonons,

Our minds are full of reawakened thoughtons

And all living things dancing in harmony with gravitons.

Human knowledge exists like mercurial ether in the universe. It binds us together as human being as the clumps of the stars in the universe are held together by invisible forces. And yet, what we are and what we see all around us represent a tiny speck in the total energy spectrum of the entire universe. Although we do not create any knowledge on our own, we simply observe it, assemble it in our prejudiced way, and assume that, once attained, it becomes our own new knowledge in our own time frame. In this sense, I have accumulated a lot of knowledge over my life time. I could let my accumulated knowledge to fade away to its original state with my personal demise of my present form and let other aliens like me rediscover the same knowledge, prejudiced or not, in their own time frame, or I could try to preserve my knowledge in some form that I personally have chosen.

Our knowledge comes from our experiences. Once I decided to write down my experiences over some four decades, initially I found it very difficult to envision where to begin and where to stop. In my autobiography Rootless: A chronicle of my life journey (Authorhouse published, 2012), I covered in a very broad stroke some of the significant events, places, and the people I encountered along my journey. In it, though, I left out most part of my years at Los Alamos which spanned nearly 40 years counting my retirement years, hoping that I would have a second chance to write this phase of my journey in a somewhat more comprehensive manner. So, this book is, in a sense, the second part of my life journey. As such, this story is not about Los Alamos. In writing my personal experience, Los Alamos provides the inseparable background of my personal story.

While Los Alamos is the underlying background of my story, Los Alamos also has been our home town for all these years. Particularly for Joan and me, we never had stable home bases to talk about, and therefore wherever we settled in for an extended period tended to become our home base. Los Alamos has given us the stability and purpose in our days, and we have many fond memories to relate to anyone who would listen to our stories.

There is a wide spread notion in the public that all things nuclear and associated work at Los Alamos are secret so that no one except those in the Laboratory knows what’s really going on at the site. This may be true in the nuclear weapons area, but Los Alamos National Laboratory is not a single mission and monolithic nuclear weapons institution in terms of its diverse program activities. Its contribution to the nuclear science, chemistry and physics, nuclear safety issues related to nuclear power reactors, accelerators for nuclear science, and even nuclear medicine, to mention only a few of those activities related to things nuclear. In addition, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been at the forefront of the modern computer technology development. For sure, scientists at Los Alamos continue their work on nuclear explosives to understand their workings and at the same time using the same advanced computers, many others are engaged in the science of weather simulation and other complex natural phenomena as well. By writing this book, one of my hopes is that the readers will get a glance of the Laboratory, and through my experience learn that a large body of our scientific work does not, should not, and cannot, fall in the secret, classified domain, thus dissipating the myth of classifying all things nuclear as secret.

A scientific institution is also like a living organism. It has its own past, present and future history. The buildings and the infrastructures and the place are merely the shell of the living organism. The people in it make this organism come to life. Collectively, we should be able to make any institution meet the aspiration of all people concerned. Sadly, over the span of my years at the Laboratory, I witnessed a noticeable dimming of its past reputation by its inept leadership and negligence, compounded by all levels of bureaucratic mismanagement. Therefore, in this book I want to share my observation with whoever is interested in following my personal story.

Decades ago, working people did not live very long after their retirement from their work, hence they did not have time to enjoy their retirement years as many people can these days. I do not advocate that people should retire from their work at an early age. Instead, I advocate that people should continue their professional work or some aspect of it if they enjoy it until their dying days. As an example, in the profession of farming, farmers seldom retire from their profession. In my case, I retired from the Laboratory after nearly 30 years of science and service work, and I still maintain my residency in Los Alamos and maintain an active life style. After leaving the Laboratory, my preference would have been to continue working in my line of scientific discipline. But that was not possible. Nevertheless, when I decided to write about my Los Alamos experience, I also decided to include some part of my experiences during my retirement years, which I found enlightening, or in some cases, fun and exciting.

As I look back on my past, there are some tasks that I wish I have had the time and put in the effort to work on, and then there are some tasks that I felt had to be done but did not get done. By writing this book, I have combined both aspects of one of these tasks. In carrying on a scientific project, the work is never complete until after the report has been written. I report my Los Alamos experiences in this book.

Finally, I would like to say that my personal DNA, thus my genetic code, has been somewhat mutated by the invasion of the science/curiosity virus from my early years. The consequence of this mutation is that I cannot take science out of my personality. Science is not something practiced only by those conversant with science topics. For me, it’s a common sense way of approaching things and activities we employ in our daily lives. In describing my experience, I tried my utmost to avoid the technical terminology that might be unfamiliar to most others. As Dr. Einstein once said, If one cannot explain it in simple words, one perhaps does not understand the subject oneself. I have tried to follow this wise person’s advice throughout my professional career. However, it is not always easy to follow this genius’ footstep even in tiny small steps. Therefore, any inaccurate statements or descriptions in this book are solely mine and I am responsible for them.

Acknowledgement

The publication of this book would not have been possible without my wife Joan’s support and encouragement. She also did all the tedious work of editing all aspects of the book.

How my family came to Los Alamos

Los Alamos is a small rural town situated high on several plateau areas of the Jemez mountain range in the northern central part of New Mexico. From the point of view of a casual observer, it may be rather unusual to see a community seemingly thriving without obvious economic or industrial bases to support the town’s prosperity. The town name Los Alamos is, however, synonymous to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and this Laboratory has been the nation’s premier defense nuclear institution for over six decades now. The United States federal government injects funds in excess of two billion dollars annually for the operation of the Laboratory and this Laboratory along with other sister national laboratories is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

As the human nature goes, places and events come into existence from the time when we become aware of our own surroundings. Things and events are rediscovered all the time as newcomers appear on the scene. In the meantime, though, history records some of the significant events and places that existed before our consciousness of our immediate and far away environment. My personal awareness and subsequent knowledge about Los Alamos came only after I finished my formal academic training and was spending a year at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. I was looking for