It's Homestake

By Bill Harlan, Journal staff
Article Source

LEAD -- The closed Homestake gold mine in Lead got new life Tuesday as the preferred site for a national underground science laboratory.

"We won!" Gov. Mike Rounds told several hundred cheering lab supporters in Lead on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, the National Science Foundation announced Homestake was the choice from among four finalist sites. Now, a group of scientists supporting the Homestake proposal will get up to $15 million over the next three years to develop a detailed design.

If the lab is built -- and Tuesday's decision does not guarantee that -- it could help create billions of dollars in economic development over the course of decades, Rounds said.

Typical experiments cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The lab could have a visitors center and education programs that would reach students throughout the region.

"It starts a new dynamic for the city of Lead and for the whole region," Lead Mayor Tom Nelson said.

Underground labs protect sensitive experiments from cosmic rays. Homestake is 8,000 feet deep, with hundreds of miles of tunnels at dozens of levels, and it could become the world's deepest lab.

Homestake was chosen by a 22-member panel of impartial experts convened by the NSF. The panel spent months reviewing underground lab proposals from South Dakota, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota.

The vote for Homestake was unanimous, said physicist Kevin Lesko of the University of California at Berkeley.

Lesko heads the "Homestake collaboration" of scientists supporting the project. The University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are the lead research institutions behind the proposal.

"We're going to be working with the National Science Foundation for the next several decades on this project," Lesko said at the ceremony in Lead.

However, construction of the so-called "Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory," or "DUSEL," is not a done deal.

The $15 million the NSF awarded Tuesday is just for the design of a DUSEL, which would be 7,400 feet underground at Homestake. Lesko said it would take at least three years to create that plan. "This decision clears the path," he said.

The actual construction of a DUSEL at Homestake could cost $300 million. It also would require the approval of the National Science Foundation, the National Science Board, the White House and Congress -- a process that will take years.

Still, construction and science will begin almost immediately at Homestake -- thanks in part to a $70 million donation from Sioux Falls philanthropist Denny Sanford, who joined Rounds at the ceremony Tuesday.

Sanford had made his donation contingent on the NSF selecting Homestake. "I'm in now," he said after the ceremony.

From now on, the "DUSEL" at Homestake will be officially known as the "SUSEL" -- or the Sanford Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

(An elated Lesko said the name change was fine with him because "DUSEL" was an impolite word in German. "Google it," he said.)

The Sanford donation also will be used for education programs at the lab.

In addition to Sanford's money, the state of South Dakota has committed another $46.5 million to develop the lab, including a $10 million federal grant that Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., pushed through the Senate in 2001.

With the NSF decision in hand and with $116.5 million in the bank, the state of South Dakota can continue its plan to re-enter the mine and create an "interim DUSEL" -- or "interim SUSEL" -- 4,850 feet underground.

The money also will be used to pump out water that has been flooding the mine for four years. The water level has almost reached the 5,000-foot level.

Physics experiments could begin as early has next year at the interim lab, Lesko said, and science could begin sooner than that. "Some research could coincide with re-entry into the mine," he said. Hydrologists, geochemists and geobiologists, for example, could take water and rock samples during re-entry.

Another selling point for Homestake was the giant gold mine itself. Homestake owner Barrick Gold Corp. of Toronto donated the mine for use as a lab.

"Without this donation, none of this would be possible," Rounds said.

That donation was engineered only after Rounds negotiated a complicated agreement to protect Barrick and Homestake from liability for the lab. State Sen. Jerry Apa, R-Lead, credits the governor with saving the project. "It was stillborn," Apa said. "He resurrected it."

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Rep. Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., also joined Rounds, Lesko, and Sanford at the announcement celebration.

Thune called the Homestake lab "transformational," both for science and for the state of South Dakota. "A project of this magnitude will bring the spotlight of discovery to Lead and the Northern Hills," he said.

Herseth Sandlin said the lab success took bipartisan support. "Once again, South Dakota has proven what we can accomplish when we work together on behalf of the future of our state," she said.

Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson, still recovering from brain surgery in December, also issued a written statement: "As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I look forward to working with John and Stephanie to help secure the millions of dollars that will be necessary to build (the lab)."

The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, which owns the closed gold mine, will act as a landlord for the mine. Researchers like Lesko will run the experiments. However, Lesko said, the exact structure of the lab management had not been worked out.

First, the Homestake collaboration will have to write a detailed SUSEL plan acceptable to the White House and Congress.

Homestake already has a reputation among astrophysicists. The late Ray Davis won a Nobel Prize for an experiment at Homestake that detected subatomic particles called neutrinos.

University of Pennsylvania physicist Al Mann has pushed for a national underground lab for decades, and Rounds singled him out Tuesday as an ardent Homestake supporter.

In September of 2000, within days of the announcement that the Homestake gold mine would close, University of Pennsylvania physicist Ken Lande, who worked with Davis, proposed converting the gold mine into a lab.

Ever since, state officials have been working with an ever-changing consortium of scientists to develop the proposal. "It's been up and down, up and down," science authority board member Pat Lebrun of Rapid City said.

But other forces also were at work.

Underground science is a hot specialty now. Recent discoveries in deep labs in Japan, Canada and Italy are changing the most fundamental theories of how the universe works, how it began and even how it might end.

Blue-ribbon panels of physicists have recommended that an underground lab be a national priority.

Such a lab also would be used to study earth sciences and extreme biological environments, and the lab could be used for homeland-security research that requires shielding from cosmic rays.

But there will also be some peacemaking to do among scientists. The DUSEL site competition was tough.

Gov. Rounds today reached out to scientists supporting the other three proposals. "My hope is that the tremendous talent and wealth of ideas proposed by all of the scientists will come together for the advancement of science," the governor said.

Lesko agreed. "We need them to succeed," he said.

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