Berkeley Engineer in Charge of DUSEL Design

BY WENDY PITLICK, Black Hills Pioneer
Article Source

LEAD When Dr. Kevin Lesko and members of the Homestake Collaboration wanted to find someone to design what could be the deepest underground laboratory in the country, they went straight to one of the best engineers they knew.

Dave Plate, who has been an engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the last 30 years, said he is very excited about designing all of the infrastructure related to the various scientific experiments proposed for a deep underground science and engineering laboratory at Homestake. Though he has only been partially involved with the project so far, he and Steve Marks, another engineer from Berkeley, plan to really dive into the project after they get the chance to visit with scientists at a conference in Lead this April. The conference will help members of the Homestake Collaboration, as well as the S.D. Science and Technology Authority, gauge which experiments will be given top priority for entering the lab, and it will give organizers a final idea for the level of interest in the scientific community. The conference will also help Plate get a better idea of the infrastructure necessary to accommodate those scientists' experiments.

With a solid background in designing and building components for particle accelerators, Plate said the prospect of designing massive neutrino detectors, clean room space, huge tanks of purified water and other infrastructure thousands of feet underground is very new to him. But it's a challenge he is looking forward to.

"It's very exciting to learn about, and to develop something that has a good chance of reaching reality," he said.

Already, Plate said he has been busy talking with scientists heading up some of the largest experiments proposed for the DUSEL. As one of the project engineers, one of his responsibilities will be to construct a massive vat of purified water, which scientists can lower their experiments in. Building the water tank also includes engineering control rooms, assembly rooms, machine shops and other companion pieces to make the entire lab work.

As he digs into the design aspect of the lab, Plate said he is looking for opportunities to put several different experiments in the same location.

"Initially a lot of the infrastructure is the same," he said. "They'll all need special air filters and special water filters for purification. They'll either need a water tank to serve as a radiation shield or they'll need a large room that is shielded with possibly concrete or metal. They all need a large area that is shielded from background radiation."

But some experiments are unique in their own right. Plate said the Majorana experiment " which speculates that neutrinos have mass and are their own antiparticle " will require facilities to develop electroforming copper underground.

"They have to actually create all of the materials that they use underground to make sure they are as low in radioactivity as possible," he said. "Their whole process is phenomenal to me, just the fact that they have to create their own materials underground to do their experiment. That's kind of mind boggling."

Currently, Plate said he is looking at a triangular design between the Yates and the Ross Shaft, which will host about three to four large caverns of science or lab modules at the 4850-foot level of the former gold mine. The caverns, he said, will be about 65 feet wide by about 164 feet long by about 65 feet tall. As an example one of these caverns could house two large water tanks, 44 feet in diameter by 33 feet tall and could house anywhere from one to eight detectors requiring purified water as a radiation shield. Control rooms, clean assembly rooms, and other infrastructure will be provided as needed. There is also the possibility for future massive neutrino detectors that will measure about 164 feet tall and about 164 feet in diameter.

When he is designing the infrastructure for the lab, Plate said he starts from the center of the room, or from the detector, and works his way out. But any designs Plate comes up with are purely conceptual right now, he stressed, as the federally funded DUSEL has yet to receive approval from the National Science Foundation and, ultimately, from Congress. That approval is tentatively scheduled to come as early as 2011.

"I create conceptual layouts and go back and forth with the scientists to figure out if this is what they had in mind," he said. "That usually goes through several iterations. It just keeps growing from there."

In addition to his work to design the lab for the federally funded DUSEL, Plate said he has also been working closely with officials from the S.D. Science and Technology Authority, as that entity works to develop a state-run interim lab at the 4,850-foot level of Homestake. He relies on their knowledge of the mine and conditions of the rock, and he acts as a consultant for their engineers who are working on designing the Sanford Lab. But since Plate is funded with the $15 million grant the NSF awarded the University of California-Berkeley to develop the Homestake proposal, he cannot serve as an engineer to develop the state-run facility.

Overall, Plate, who was only casually familiar with the process to secure Homestake as the National Science Foundation's preferred site for the DUSEL, said he is very excited about working on the lab at Homestake. Having grown up in a mining town in Montana, and with Marks growing up in Wyoming, he said each time they come to Lead it's almost like coming home.

"Having read through the four proposals, I couldn't understand why it wouldn't happen (at Homestake,)" Plate said of the proposed location for the DUSEL. "I always thought it should be the leading candidate. Of course, I might have been somewhat prejudiced. It just seemed like the smart thing to do. The U.S. is spending money to develop experiments that are going to other places in the world. We should have our own facility.

"It is an exciting project," he continued. "I am happy to be involved and I just hope it all goes well over the next few years so we can all celebrate when the first blast of dynamite goes off in the cavern signaling the first excavation for the first DUSEL experimental lab."

Back to news archive