Plan to build lab in mine aims to strike scientific gold
LEAD, S.D. -- Like a world unto itself, the shafts and tunnels of the Homestake gold mine run more than a mile and a half deep beneath the peaceful vistas of Ponderosa pines and granite crags of the northern Black Hills of western South Dakota, deeper than any other mine in North America.
Men pounded and drilled and exploded their way through the rock in the hot damp darkness for 125 years, generation after generation busting loose and hauling up millions of tons of ore to the surface, so that the precious gold could be chemically extracted and sold to the world.
It was the country's oldest operating mine when it finally ran out of profitable ore and was closed in 2001. Now the shuttered engineering marvel awaits a second and very different life. Many of the nation's scientists are hoping it will become the nation's newest mother lode for basic scientific research. It is the perfect place for them to try to answer how our universe really works, they say, simply because it is such a very deep hole.
Homestake is where one of the 2002 Nobel Prize winners in physics, Ray Davis from the University of Pennsylvania and formerly of Brookhaven National Laboratory, conducted decades of research into solar neutrinos, working in a small laboratory 4,800 feet underground in an otherwise unused area of the mine, using a 100,000-gallon tank of dry cleaning fluid as the neutrino detector. At that depth, cosmic interference that would be present on the earth's surface or at shallower locations is screened out.
The National Science Foundation supported the research of Davis and others at their relatively primitive lab, and it was one of his fellow scientists and friends, John Bahcall, who publicly called for creating a national underground laboratory. The original work done by Davis, Bahcall, and other leading scientists on neutrinos provided a key link in better understanding the sun and its thermonuclear center.
The neutrinos, subatomic particles akin to electrons, pass through the Earth -- and us -- from the sun undetected except by high-tech experimental devices.
"We don't basically know what 99 percent of the universe is," said professor Jordan A. Goodman. The University of Maryland physics department chairman is leader of one of the laboratory project's review teams. "This mine is a telescope into that new world," he said.
The professors and researchers are talking about dark matter and neutrinos, involving experiments that use vessels the size of office buildings full of ultrapure water.
There also are plans for other work, such as studying the biology of microbes that might help tell how life began, figuring out better ways to store nuclear waste, and operating national security projects that can monitor and verify the development of nuclear weapon testing programs around the globe.
MIT professor Kate Scholberg is a member of the group working to develop the underground laboratory. A specialist in experimental elementary particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, she is part of the search for antimatter and dark matter in space. She said the neutrino research could help the United States become the leader in the field.
"Such understanding feeds into global knowledge of fundamental physics, which in turn feeds into our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology -- in effect giving us insight into the way the universe came to be the way it is," Scholberg said.
She said it's similar to the fundamental research into cosmic rays during the first half of the 20th century that eventually drove significant technological advances decades later.
For decades, jobs at Homestake and its support businesses drove the economy of the Black Hills. The company is even credited with helping the state government get through the Depression's financial problems by agreeing to start paying higher taxes. Years of pollution from the company's mining chemicals put Whitewood Creek on the Superfund list, but the cleanup effort that followed turned the stream into a top destination for trout fishing enthusiasts.
While there are other laboratories with generally similar purposes already operating, such as the Super-K in Japan, or being planned, such as Ice Cube at the South Pole, leading US scientists and government officials want a national lab on US soil. The Homestake lab also would serve a much broader range of experiments, rather than focusing primarily on neutrino research.
The decisions to cease mining and then to merge San Francisco-based Homestake Mining Co. in 2001 with Barrick Gold Corp. caused huge uncertainty in western South Dakota. While many of the mining professionals moved onto new jobs elsewhere on the continent as Homestake scaled down production during the later 1990s, most townspeople stuck around, especially after the National Science Foundation chose Homestake in May as the preferred site for an underground lab.
The next big step calls for the National Science Foundation to make funding recommendations later this winter to the White House and then to Congress as part of the federal 2006 budget. Barrick Gold, the mine's new owner based in Toronto, is prepared to donate the underground operations for the laboratory in 2004, after the South Dakota Legislature creates a special management authority to serve as the site's landlord. The legislative session runs January through March. "Homestake can be an economic, scientific, and educational gold mine once again for the state," said Governor Mike Rounds, a Republican in his first year in office.
Assuming that the funding comes through, the timetable drawn by the scientists calls for construction work inside the mine to start in 2006, with the first detector equipment for experiments installed from 2007 to 2009. The scientists' basic plan calls for $101 million to be spent on new infrastructure and lab facilities inside the mine.
