The NSF, after years of head-scratching, has selected the idle Homestake Gold Mine near Lead (that’s “leed”) in the Black Hills to house a national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. It might be name-changed to SUSEL, for Sanford, which is an existing lab there. (Hi res pic here). The place has housed experiments before but nothing on the scale to come. Big detectors will look for neutrinos emerging from great distance. Other experiments will run tests that can bear no interference from ordinary cosmic rays. And so on. (That is, if it’s actually built — the decision just means the design, led by a UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab group, will assume S.Dakota as the site.)

It’s a story for anybody — including local papers whose nearby contenders lost — and several big outlets have it. In South Dakota it is huge.

With all the dreariness in the science writing trade over buyouts and layoffs and shrinking news holes in the daily press, it is a tonic to see the intense coverage the smallish Sioux Falls Argus Leader is throwing into this lump of science news — even if it has no new science to report. It has four stories on it with separate bylines. That’s a lot for a paper that, while the state’s biggest, has a circulation of about 55,000.

The A-L staff tackles it gamely.

In the lead story’s lede, Terry Woster boldly declares “Discoveries that change the way the world thinks about science will happen at the bottom of the abandoned Homestake mine…”.

The economic angle is handled by Jon Walker who says “South Dakota took a quantum leap Tuesday,”

Ben Shouse reviews the science that already has unfolded in the old mine (it has housed a series of experiments over the years) and the promise of more “answers to questions about life and the universe” to come.

On the practical and political side, Peter Harriman describes how much money it may mean for the state.

Other stories:

Rapid City Journal (SD) Bill Harlan (first quote from gov: “We Won!”) ; AP Mary Clare Jalonick; , Seattle Times Judy Chia Hui Hsu largely on rejection of a local contender; Denver Post Katy Human on disappointment there that their local proposal, also in an old mine, got stiffed; Coloradoan (campus paper) Hallie Woods with stunned quotes from CSU faculty; AAAS ScienceNOW Adrian Cho; Contra Costa Times (CA) Betsy Mason;

Grist for the Mill:

NSF Press Release; LBNL Press Release; Homestake DUSEL Website; Sanford Lab Press Release.

-CP

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