Underground lab ins and outs

For 10 days in June, it looked like Washington State’s Cascade mountains might be back in the running to host the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. NSF granted an appeal, which meant the Cascades site, like the Henderson mine in Colorado and Homestake mine in South Dakota, would receive $500 000 for developing a conceptual design for DUSEL.

But NSF withdrew its support when it learned that in the months since filing the appeal, the Cascades group had shifted its focus from Icicle Creek, an undeveloped site, to Pioneer Tunnel. “We recognized this was a better location,” says the University of Washington’s Wick Haxton, one the chief backers of building DUSEL in the Cascades. “It had power, drainage, and ventilation in a parallel tunnel that we could piggyback off of.”

NSF has left the door open for a Cascades site—and others—to rejoin the DUSEL site competition this fall. But, says Haxton, “we’re in a catch-22. Too much time has been lost. It’s better for science if we support one of the other sites.”

That support comes easy because the Homestake and Henderson sites have “excellent proposals,” Haxton adds, and “the problems I felt were insoluble at Homestake—the ownership and the flooding of the mine—have, in fact, been solved.”

In other DUSEL news, T. Denny Sanford, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, banker, donated $70 million in late June for improving the Homestake mine’s infrastructure and creating a science and education center.