Never mind, I’ll try to reconstruct them soon, when I get a chance. :\

Is there a problem?

I’d like to know why my comments appear to repeatedly be getting removed.

Thank you.

Moreover, the various reports from the several independent review panels convened by NSF all pointed out that there is simply not enough useable deep underground space worldwide to accommodate all of the worthwhile experiments that people want to do. That sounds like a reasonable physics justification to me, but maybe our esteemed contributors know better than the NSF panels?

And by the way, the argument that the money you would save by not doing DUSEL would somehow be better spent on Physics (what Physics, exactly, is not specified) doesn’t hold water. Large project money at the NSF comes out of a special account for major research equipment, so any money not spent on DUSEL would simply go to a different project; another telescope, perhaps, or nanocenters and the like. All these things may be worthy, but they are really what DUSEL will be competing against for funds, not your grant.

To cut a long story short, this was during a period of full mining operations. I personally do not plan to risk a similar situation when the place becomes an undermanned scientific laboratory. Ellipsis, you are pushing all the right buttons, the money should be going to the Physics, and the spirit of international collaboration should be leading us all to SNOlab. The only good news is that the laboratory is not built yet, the approval is for design work. Hopefully in the interim people will come back to their senses.

The LHC received 500 million dollars in U.S. funding, and is still receiving.

Perhaps you’d prefer they spent 14 billion just duplicating the LHC in the U.S.?

I would hope my record of approximately 3 million in DOE Office of Science funding (lifetime, so far) might give me just a little tiny bit of perspective, gbob…

On the other hand, SNOLAB’s clean and fully experiment-ready lab facilities (with many U.S. collaborators on SNO) are at 6020 mwe, the deepest in the world (with the exception of the Kolar mine in India, which certainly could not be considered experiment-ready at this time).

It is true that a future gigantic water-Cherenkov type experiment, e.g. UNO, really would not fit at SNOLAB, as caverns of megaton experiment size would not be supported by the rock there. But essentially all _present and upcoming decade_ dark matter direct dectection and 0-nu bb decay experiments are at the 100 kg (and soon to be 1 ton) scale — that’s the equivalent of 1 cubic meter of water — a trivial fit for SNOLAB.

And a project like UNO is clearly _not_ for the very near future. For one thing, even UNO would not be nearly large enough to detect actual standard model levels of proton decay — that would literally require a detector 4 orders of magnitude larger than even UNO! And topics such as theta13 and the CP phase delta are much better served by dedicated facilities like NOvA, T2K(K), Daya Bay, and Double Chooz than some behemoth blunderbuss money pit like UNO (+ new neutrino beamline). UNO is a project without a clear goal, just like this whole U.S. DUSEL issue. And I am speaking as one who is _all for_ deep underground science. NSF just has its priorities completely backwards here: it needs to focus on specific scientific measurements, and build _solely_ the necessary facilities to achieve its specific scientific goals. What’s needed now is more money for experiments like EXO, SuperCDMS, Zeplin/Xenon (which, btw, are really the same experiment and need to merge, despite the personality conflicts involved), DEAP, Majorana, etc. — NOT just tossing money down a new pit when presently there are _plenty_ of good ones around already.