| Lab crews making strides in pump installation, space excavation |
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| Written by Wendy Pitlick |
| Tuesday, 22 June 2010 |
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LEAD Crews and contractors charged with re-opening the former Homestake Gold Mine and excavating space for an underground science lab 4,850 feet below the surface are making excellent progress, lab officials reported Thursday.
Ron Wheeler, executive director of the Sanford Lab, said work to install a permanent deep well pumping system down to the 8,000-foot level of the mine should be done by next week. Hydro Resources, with headquarters in Houston, Texas, is the company that has been charged with installing the system and current progress is below the 5,000-foot level. In addition to the work Hydro Resources is doing, Wheeler said the Sanford Lab staff has been busy removing old Homestake utilities to prepare to build a pumping column from the 5,000-foot level to 3,650 feet below ground, where a permanent pumping station will be housed. Wheeler said he hopes to have the pump column installed by the end of July. The permanent pumping station and the deep well pumping system will replace the temporary, smaller pumps that have been installed every 100 feet in the mine. Wheeler said this system will require less maintenance and will allow crews to move much faster in their work to rehabilitate and prepare the mine for science. Willy McElroy, who is personally overseeing the pipe column installation and the excavation for the interim lab space for the Sanford Lab, said his crew has also made significant progress excavating the Davis Cavern, as well as the transition space that will house clean rooms and support facilities for the scientists. “As of last Thursday we’re happy to say that from east to west and south to north, the excavation is complete for the transition cavern,” McElroy said. He went on to explain that the space is 50 feet wide by 135 feet long. Currently it is about 13 feet high, but over the next weeks crews will be working to excavate 4 feet from the bottom, making the space 17 feet high. McElroy also reported that crews have installed extensometers in the transition cavern, which will measure the movement of the rock. That knowledge is critical to the underground lab construction, he said, and will be used for the life of the lab. The Davis Cavern, McElroy said, is also nearly complete. At 40 feet tall he said much of the excavation is complete except for 4 more feet to be taken out of the bottom. Afterward, crews will treat the walls with shotcrete and put down a concrete floor in both caverns. Outfitting for the space will include wall construction, heating, cooling, electricity and other necessary utilities. All of that, McElroy said, could be done by October 2011. The Davis Cavern will host the LUX (Large Underground Xenon) dark matter detector, as well as the Majorana experiment that will examine neutrinoless double beta decay. The transition cavern will allow scientists to move into a clean room and prepare to enter their sterile and isolated experiment area. |
