“I think the worst moment is in the past,” says Eugenio Coccia, his feet barely wet as new director of Gran Sasso National Laboratory in the Apennines, northeast of Rome. Coccia joined the world’s largest underground lab on 16 June, the same day that a court lifted a restriction that had brought the lab to a near standstill in the aftermath of a small chemical leak.
The leak occurred a year ago, when scientists who were testing the purity of the scintillator pseudocumene (1,2,4-trimethylbenzene) for Borexino, a solar neutrino detector, turned a reverse-oriented valve the wrong way. About 50 liters escaped. Picnickers smelled pseudocumene’s gasolinelike odor in a stream, says Frank Calaprice, the principal investigator for US participation in the experiment. “They found one dead fish. The incident was minor in terms of environmental damage, but major in terms of political implications for the lab.”
Indeed, the matter might...
