South Dakota Governor's Office of Economic Development

What next for DUSEL?

By Bill Harlan, Journal staff

The National Science Foundation’s recommendation for a site for a national underground laboratory will be greeted by cheers at one of four locations.

Teams of scientists representing the Homestake gold mine in Lead and sites in Colorado, Washington and Minnesota have spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on their proposals -- each 250 pages long. They’ve also hosted site visits by an NSF panel of experts, and they made presentations to the NSF panel in Washington.
Now, all four teams are waiting for the NSF decision, which could come any time in the next few weeks.

The stakes are high. National laboratories typically employ hundreds of people, or more. A national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory could attract hundreds of millions of dollars in research. Over the course of decades, the investment could reach billions of dollars.

However, the NSF choice of sites this spring will mark only the beginning of an even longer process, and there’s no guarantee of success.

The chosen site team will receive as much as $5 million a year for up to three years to create a formal and detailed construction, engineering and science proposal.

A DUSEL could cost $300 million to build and start. It also would be the first new full-fledged national laboratory built in decades and a first initiated by the NSF. (The Department of Energy is the biggest patron of national laboratories.)

Because the project is so big, the next DUSEL proposal will be submitted to an NSF program called the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account, or MREFC.
The MREFC proposal will go to the National Science Board -- an advisory committee to the NSF. If the board approves DUSEL, the project goes on a list of MREFC proposals to await funding.

“It will have to compete with a variety of other kinds of science,” Sherry Farwell said.

Farwell is a professor and researcher at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City. He also was an early member of the Homestake team, and he’s also a veteran of two stints at the NSF.

Farwell said projects in fields such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and high-energy physics (accelerators and the like) also are in the MREFC pipeline.
A DUSEL would have experiments in biology and geosciences, but the push for a DUSEL comes from astrophysicists and particle physicists, who use deep labs to shield sensitive experiments from background cosmic radiation.

High-energy physicists also might have a stake in a DUSEL, where a “target” could be set up to measure beams of neutrinos generated in far-away accelerators.
A broad range of experiments will make DUSEL more attractive, and recent success in underground science, particularly in neutrino physics, also add weight to the case for a DUSEL.

“The physics community is very vocal,” Farwell said. “But the process is open to anyone, and you have to prove a return on investment.”

The NSF’s budget request to Congress for fiscal 2008 said MREFC projects should “represent an exceptional opportunity” and that they should be “transformative in nature” and have “the potential to shift the paradigm in scientific understanding.”

Also of note, the NSF’s entire MREFC request for fiscal 2008 was $245 million -- or about the start-up cost of a DUSEL, which likely would be built over the course of several budgets.

On the plus side, a Homestake DUSEL already has some money. The state of South Dakota has raised a potential $115 million for the project in state and federal funds and a $70 million donation from Sioux Falls philanthropist Denny Sanford.

A South Dakota DUSEL might have another advantage, too, Farwell said.

Farwell recently completed 2-1/2 years at NSF headquarters running the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, better known as EPSCoR. The program funnels research money to traditionally research-poor states, such as South Dakota. A Homestake DUSEL might be eligible for EPSCoR money not available in Colorado, Minnesota or Washington.

Still, even if the NSF picks Homestake and even if the National Science Board approves a DUSEL, there is no guarantee Congress will fund the project.

“It will come down to the soundness of the plan and the projected return on investments relative to pushing back scientific frontiers,” Farwell said.

Physicists supporting all four sites make the case for that investment.

The late Ray Davis certainly pushed back scientific frontiers at Homestake, winning a Nobel Prize for a 35-year neutrino experiment 4,850 feet underground in the gold mine.
Recent breakthroughs in neutrino research in underground labs in Japan and Canada -- based in part on work by Davis -- have earned media headlines.

A researcher at an underground lab who detects other mysterious phenomena such as “dark matter” or “proton decay” will also win headlines -- and maybe a trip to Stockholm.
Whether the National Science Board, the White House and Congress will think those frontiers worthy of an investment remains to be seen.

For a comparison of all four sites being considered, go to www.rapidcityjournal.com/features/snews/mines/.
For continuous updates and reports from reporter Bill Harlan about the selection process and his travels to the four sites, visit The Final Four of Physics blog at http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/blogs/mines/
Contact Harlan at 394-8424 or at bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com