ZPEnergy.com - Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory

Team selected for the proposed design of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory

NSF has made an award to a team headed by Kevin Lesko of the University of California at Berkeley to develop a technical design for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced selection of a University of California-Berkeley proposal to produce a technical design for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) at the former Homestake gold mine near Lead, S.D. The Homestake team, headed by Kevin Lesko, could receive up to $5 million per year for up to three years.

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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?

Those and other crucial questions can only be investigated at great depth, where thousands of feet of rock can shield ultra-sensitive physics experiments from background activity, and where geoscientists, biologists and engineers can have direct access to geological structures, tectonic processes and life forms that cannot be studied fully in any other way. Several countries, including Canada, Italy and Japan, have extensive deep science programs. The United States has no existing facilities below a depth of 1 kilometer.

If eventually built as envisioned by its supporters, a Homestake DUSEL would be the largest and deepest facility of its kind in the world.

Source: National Science Foundation
Read the whole article: http://www.physorg.com/news103298239.html