A 22-member panel of external experts, all screened for conflicts of interest, exhaustively merit-reviewed proposals from four teams and unanimously determined that the Homestake proposal offered the greatest potential for developing a DUSEL, and NSF concurred with the panel's recommendation. The agency's selection of the Homestake proposal provides funding only for design work. Any decision to construct and operate a DUSEL would entail a sequence of approvals by NSF and the National Science Board; funding would then have to be requested by the Administration and approved by Congress.
One can only hope that this is not going to be another one that get supported in the beginning, but left dangling in the middle.
Zz.
Edit: Yowzah! I can't believe the amount of grief I got due to my typo of "Homestake" into "Homestead".
2 comments:
Must confess, I had a bit of fun with your renaming Homestake, but at least you didn't move it to North Dakota as did the Berkeley Lab site.
Good to see a Physics site. Years ago, I wasted some Physics profs;' time at SDSM&T which is in Rapid City about 40 miles or so from Lead, SD.
Check Dakota Today Blog for abuse of your minor error.
The concept of DUSEL grew out of the need for an interdisciplinary "deep science" laboratory that would allow researchers to probe some of the most compelling questions in modern science. Among them: What are the invisible dark matter and dark energy that comprise more than 95 percent of everything visible in the universe? What is the nature of ghostly particles called neutrinos that pervade the cosmos, but almost never interact with matter, and what can certain kinds of extremely rare radioactivity and particle decay reveal about the fundamental behavior of atoms? Will this site help reliably predict and control earthquakes? What are the characteristics of microorganisms at great depth? These are all areas of research that have interested me for many years. Being a native of the Black Hills, I could not be more supportive of the DUSEL initiative. From the Stratobowl in the 1930s to DUSEL, this is just one more example of the uniqueness of the Hills. If you would like to read about all these scientific advances woven into a page-turner of a SF novel try picking up a copy of CARBON by Bill Bishop or check it out at carboneaters.com
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