Homestake clearly best choice for underground science lab

By The Rapid City Journal Editorial Board
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Every spring, the nation's best college basketball teams are whittled down to the Final Four, and the winner of the NCAA tournament is the team that has the most skills in all facets of the game: offense, defense, coaching, teamwork and depth.

South Dakota has made the cut to a different kind of Final Four. It's not a game, but it is an intense competition that, like the NCAA tournament, only one team will win. We are competing with Colorado, Minnesota and Washington to be the site of a national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL.

We believe South Dakota is a clear favorite and should emerge the winner of that competition. We believe the National Science Foundation should choose the former Homestake gold mine in Lead as the site for the DUSEL. And here's why:

Homestake is a perfect location because it is already mined out to 8,000 feet, which would make it the deepest underground science laboratory in the world. One drawback is water, which has been gradually filling up the closed mine for four years. But it's easier to pump out water than drill, blast and remove rock.

The mine has in place a huge amount of pre-excavated underground real estate, hundreds of miles of tunnels and four large shafts, all of which are almost ready for use.

And Homestake would be a dedicated facility for science only, with no conflicts with other users.

A national science lab would be good for any state or community, but a national underground lab in South Dakota would receive the warmest welcome possible because we are a small state, and the DUSEL would be our major scientific research institution. It also doesn't hurt that a lab in Lead would be just an hour away from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, the state's top science and technology university.

And the evidence of how welcome the lab would be in South Dakota is the $115-million package the state has already assembled in a combination of a $70-million pledged donation by philanthropist T. Denny Sanford, a $35-million commitment from the state, and a $10-million grant won by the state's congressional delegation, under the leadership of Sen. Tim Johnson.

In addition, Gov. Mike Rounds put together an ingenious plan that persuaded Barrick Gold Corp., a Canadian mining company, to donate the underground mine and 500 surface acres to the state.

Homestake Mine operated for 125 years before being closed in 2001. Throughout that period miners were constantly doing core samples and testing the rock. All that data is readily available for scientists, even the rock samples.

And one important consideration is that South Dakota is an EPSCoR state, which means the U.S. Department of Energy's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research has identified us as a state that should receive more federal research funding.

While the EPSCoR status does not bear on whether Homestake is the best place for the lab by scientific standards, the designation does mean that a lab at Homestake will have avenues available for funding that are not available in bigger, richer states.

Keep in mind that even if the National Science Foundation chooses Homestake, it does not guarantee a lab will be built here. The site selected in this round will receive $15 million to, over the next three years, develop a more detailed plan to establish a deep underground lab.

The next round will be tougher. Congress, the White House and the National Science Board - the governing board of the National Science Foundation - must approve the science foundation's choice, which is no easy decision considering it will cost an estimated $300 million to open an underground lab.

But Homestake has a track record already in the scientific community. The late Ray Davis won a Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his work on neutrino detection - at the 4,850-foot level of Homestake Mine. Davis' work in South Dakota proved to be a gateway to the modern field of neutrino physics.

We think there are at least a couple more Nobel Prizes to be earned down in Homestake Mine, and hope the National Science Foundation thinks the same.

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