It’s Homestake:
NSF picks Lead site for National Laboratory

The National Science Foundation has chosen Homestake gold mine in Lead as the site for a proposed national underground science laboratory, state officials announced today. Deep labs protect sensitive experiments from cosmic rays. Homestake is 8,000 feet deep, with hundreds of miles of tunnels at dozens of levels.

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This is a great thing for South Dakota, and will enable use of the existing infrastructure of the closed Homestake gold mine located in Lead (pronounced leed, you know, like an ore lead in the rock).

According to the NSF announcement, a 22-member panel of impartial “external experts,” reviewed four sites – including proposals from Colorado, Washington and Minnesota – before voting unanimously for Homestake.

The University of California at Berkeley is the lead research institution for the Homestake proposal. Berkeley physicist Kevin Lesko, who heads the “Homestake collaboration” of scientists, said the NSF decision would help attract even more researchers to the project. “It removes the uncertainty,” he said.

A new national laboratory in Lead could host experiments costing hundreds of millions of dollars – or even billions of dollars, over the course of decades. The lab could have a visitors center and education programs that would reach students throughout the region.