After NSF was forced last December to throw in the towel on establishing an underground laboratory in the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota, the US Department of Energy began analyzing the possibility of making something of the site. If it does, the facility would be smaller and would have a tighter scientific focus than NSF had planned. DOE will decide soon—in time for inclusion in the fiscal year 2013 budget—whether to drop Homestake, go full force, or fund it at an amount that keeps options open.
Since at least 2000, US scientists have been working to have a deep underground lab for experiments that need shielding from cosmic rays and background radioactivity. For DOE, those are the long baseline neutrino experiment (LBNE) and searches for neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter. The multidisciplinary NSF plan for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) also included programs...
