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Sunday, November 17, 2002

Missing LANL Items High-Tech Devices

Journal Staff Report
    Attachments to an internal report on missing items at Los Alamos National Laboratory provide detailed lists of equipment reported as missing.
    The attachments indicate that nearly $2.1 million worth of items were reported missing in fiscal year 1999. In 2000, $143,000 in missing items are listed, and in 2001, $533,000 in missing items are listed.
    The lists include numerous desktop, personal and laptop computers; cell phones; printers; and still video and television cameras.
    But more expensive items are also on the list. They are obviously high-tech items, but there is no description with them.
    For example, in 2001, the lab's Physics Division lost an oscilloscope valued at more than $14,000; a "power supply" worth $23,700; a lathe engine, $11,000; and a spectrometer, worth more than $20,000.
    The Nuclear Materials Technology Division was missing a leak detector worth $18,665. Other items on the 2001 list include a residual gas analyzer, $12,465; a $10,000 electronic plotter; a $20,540 oscillator module; a $9,750 work station; and power transformers valued at $9,290 and $6,444.
    Some of the big items listed as lost or stolen for fiscal 1999 include a $23,000 printer; a $15,000 power supply; two $20,000 oscilloscopes; a $25,000 item listed as a control milling machine; a generator valued at $19,600; a $6,419 forklift; a $16,975 electrophorometer; two lasers, one valued at $18,425 and another at $7,125.
    Several items reported missing in 1999 were worth more than $30,000, including a wire brush machine, $33,000; a magnet valued at $39,000; a lifting magnet, $31,340; and a central processing unit, $31,860.