By RICHARD NEBELThis is a letter in support of the recent post by Andy Andrews and the people from LABi. Although I’m not a member of LABi and I don’t speak for them or any other Los Alamos business, I strongly support the type of economic development that they are trying to promote.
We are a one horse town and the fact that we do not have a diversified economy is the biggest long-term danger that this community faces. Fortunately, there are some things that we can do about it both individually and collectively. Since I’m not sure that we have enough of a consensus to do things collectively yet, (but we will eventually get there by necessity) I’m going to focus my comments on individual actions.
I see two major assets in Los Alamos that can help us diversify our economy. The first asset is the people in the community. There are people in this community who can do anything. The lab not only recruited first rate scientists and engineers, but they also recruited first rate technicians and machinists. You can find somebody in this community who knows how to do just about any job, no matter how specialized it may be.
The second important asset is that we have a lot of people in this community who are relatively financially secure. In particular, many of us who are retired have a good enough pension that we don’t need to bring home a paycheck in order to have a reasonable standard of living. When I retired four years ago, I decided that I was going to work on things that interested me, not the DOE or the DOD. That proved to be a liberating experience that was very productive. One of the things I discovered (by accident) was a previously unknown set of solutions that allowed us to use a plasma as a DC-DC transformer or as an AC-DC convertor.
We have now demonstrated the physics of these devices in the laboratory. While this may not seem like a big deal, the market for these types of devices was about $6 billion/year in 2012 and it is anticipated to grow to $89.6 billion/year by the year 2020. Since our new technology is a paradigm change that drastically reduces the cost of transformers, it’s possible that we could take the entire market. That’s about 40 times the size of the annual budget of LANL. Can you imagine what bringing even a little bit of that market to Los Alamos would do to the economy of this town?
Los Alamos has always been a place of big ideas and we have the talent up here to pull them off. I would like to encourage my fellow retirees to take advantage of your freedom and see what kind of interesting things you can dream up and develop. Even if only a few projects come to fruition, they could have an enormous impact on the economy of this town. And even if you fall flat on your face (which may happen to my project as well) I can assure you that you will have a marvelous time doing it. And isn’t that what retirement is supposed to be all about?
P.S If any of you are interested in what we are doing with the plasma-based transformers, drop me an e-mail at r_nebel@hotmail.com and I’ll be happy to show you our laboratory.
