Rocky Mountain News: LocalRocky Mountain News To print this page, select File then Print from your browser URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5263851,00.html Underground lab race nears end Henderson Mine team polishes bid for $300 million project By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News January 8, 2007 Colorado researchers are putting the finishing touches on a detailed proposal to build a $300 million federally funded underground laboratory inside Henderson Mine near Empire. The 250-page proposal is due Tuesday at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. This spring, the federal agency is expected to award up to $15 million to the team that wins the competition for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, known as DUSEL. The lab would host groundbreaking physics, geology and microbiology experiments. "The content is all there, and we are just doing some polishing," Colorado State University physicist Robert Wilson said of the proposal. "I'm feeling quite good about what we've been able to do. The completeness of what we've prepared, as well as its scope, are very impressive." In 2005, Henderson Mine and South Dakota's Homestake Mine beat out six other teams vying for the DUSEL project. The two finalists were awarded $500,000 apiece from the NSF to prepare a conceptual design for the facility. The Henderson and Homestake teams submitted their design proposals last June. Around the same time, a University of Washington-led team that had been eliminated from the competition in 2005 asked that its DUSEL proposal be reconsidered. The NSF determined there was merit to the University of Washington protest. As a result, the agency decided that the next round of the competition - culminating in the 250-page proposal that's due Tuesday - would be open to any U.S. college or university. "We simply felt that in order to be as fair as possible to all concerned, the best thing to do was to open up the competition," said Judy Sunley, the NSF's executive officer for mathematical and physical sciences. But the leader of the Henderson Mine team, physicist Chang Jung of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, didn't see it that way. "Clearly, what NSF has done is not fair and creates a lot of problems," Jung said when the decision to reopen the competition was announced in June. In late September, the NSF issued a request for site selection and technical design development proposals for the DUSEL project. That's the document due Tuesday. It must provide a detailed description of the construction project, including cost, schedule and staffing requirements. In addition, the proposal must include an initial suite of science experiments for the lab. "The site-specific plan is to be visionary, in that the plan could be extended in future phases to accommodate the most important scientific goals defined by the research communities," the NSF's September proposal request states. 'Unique in the world' The $15 million that will go to the winning team will be used to continue development of its DUSEL plan over the next three years. If DUSEL construction is funded by Congress, groundbreaking could occur in fiscal year 2010, said Jon Kotcher, NSF program director for the physics portion of the project. "This facility will be unique in the world. There is no multidisciplinary underground laboratory of this scope and depth and breadth anywhere," Kotcher said. "It's envisioned as a real international center for all types and approaches to basic underground research." CSU's Wilson said the Henderson team's hopes were buoyed by a recent critique of the 99-page DUSEL conceptual design proposal submitted in June. The NSF named a panel of scientists and engineers to review the Henderson and Homestake plans. The expert panel provided 20-page assessments to both teams. "The proposal covers an impressive spectrum of issues and describes an ambitious, first-rate scientific and engineering research program," the Henderson critique states. "The physics program foreseen is world-leading and enables - already in the initial suite of experiments - definitive measurements addressing some of the most fundamental questions in science." But a geologist on the Homestake team said the South Dakota proposal received a glowing review as well. Homestake researchers are upbeat and confident, too, about the follow-up proposal to be submitted on Tuesday, said William Roggenthen of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. "At this stage, after working Christmas and New Year's, we're pretty well done," Roggenthen said. "And it's a good-looking document. "We feel that we have momentum and that it's building. And that's really the key thing." Protection from rays Physicists need to go deep underground to gain shielding from cosmic rays that bombard the Earth's surface. Those rays interfere with the sensitive detectors used to search for neutrinos and other exotic subatomic particles. The existing Henderson molybdenum mine tunnels are suitable for some of the early DUSEL experiments. But deeper passages would be needed for more cutting-edge efforts. The biggest and most exotic experiment being considered for Henderson is the Underground Nucleon Decay and Neutrino Observatory, known as UNO. One proposed UNO configuration calls for three giant cube-shaped chambers, each nearly 200 feet on a side, to be gouged from granite 5,550 feet beneath the summit of Harrison Mountain. In one scenario, the rock walls would be sealed watertight, then the chambers would be filled with 640,000 tons of ultrapure water - enough water to fill 180 Olympic-size swimming pools. Neutrinos would stream through a mile of rock and into the tanks. One in a billion would collide with the nucleus of a hydrogen or oxygen atom in a water molecule. The impact would spark a tiny flash of light, and detectors lining the walls of the chamber would capture the outburst for analysis. Henderson Mine • Claim to fame: The mine is home to the world's second-largest-known molybdenum deposit and yields 28,000 tons of ore a day. • Inside the mine: About 150 miles of tunnels have been carved from the granite, creating a labyrinth of drifts, ramps and shafts. Seventy percent of the tunnel space is no longer used because the ore has been extracted. • Lab potential: If Henderson is selected for the underground laboratory, abandoned cavities up to 4,800 feet beneath the surface could be used for early physics experiments. ericksonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5129 Copyright 2007, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.