[DUSELScience] Institute for Underground Science (IUS) DUSEL

[Marvin Marshak]

Dear Colleague,

As you may know, the National Science Foundation received proposals  
from South Dakota, Colorado, the University of Minnesota and the  
University of Washington on January 9 for the current round of site  
selection for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory  
(DUSEL). The NSF has scheduled site visits for early March and  
“reverse” site visits in Washington for late April. The Minnesota  
(Soudan) site visit is scheduled for Friday, March 9.

The University of Minnesota is proposing a multi-site vision for  
DUSEL, integrated by an Institute for Underground Science (IUS) on  
the University's campus in Minneapolis. The IUS will work with  
existing sites in North America, including SNOLab, Soudan,  
Kimballton, WIPP and Homestake 4850. We believe that this approach  
represents a less risky and more cost-effective strategy than a  
single-site DUSEL, given the current budgetary context. It also has  
many advantages with respect to exploiting the unique properties of  
each site, such as sedimentary rock at Kimballton, the NuMI neutrino  
beam to Soudan and infrastructure and low uranium-thorium backgrounds  
at WIPP. In addition, a multi-site strategy provides a richer base  
for DUSEL geoscience, bioscience, engineering and education/outreach  
programs, because it incorporates a variety of geologic settings and  
broadens geographic diversity. We also propose to use the majority of  
the $15 million available for DUSEL over the next three years to  
directly fund underground science and technology, including seed  
money and operations for experiments, thus insuring that the push  
for  DUSEL does not at the same time underfund current and pending   
underground science initiatives.

Our proposal is available at the website http://www.soudan.umn.edu

Comments on our plan and our proposal are welcome. If you would like  
to discuss IUS DUSEL on the telephone, we would be pleased to call you.

Best regards,

Calvin Alexander (alexa001 at umn.edu)

Prisca Cushman (prisca at physics.umn.edu)

Marvin Marshak (marshak at umn.edu)

Dean Peterson (dpeters1 at nrri.umn.edu)

Earl Peterson (eap at physics.umn.edu)



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