I asked the exhibit people about it, and this is what I found out.
As you can imagine, the Safety and Security Division as Los Alamos National Laboratory is a large and important part of our work. There are gates all around the lab, both indoors and outdoors very much like this one. With normal usage, some of this equipment wears out and is collected for repair. When this exhibit was prepared, the safety and security people collected the parts from materials they had left over from refurbishing gates all over the lab, and put together our gate and hand scanner for us. So our gate doesn’t have its own story until it was assembled for us.
This was several years ago, and some facilities have more modern equipment, but this gate represents a feature that many workers at LANL use every day to get into and out of their work places.
