Town Sees Riches in Abandoned Gold Mine

Eight years after the Homestake gold mine here was shut down, this town is fashioning an unlikely economic-stimulus plan from the warren of tunnels the miners left behind. This past week, the mine was rechristened the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake. The event celebrated the first steps toward transforming the mine into a place for scientists to hunt for fundamental particles difficult to find on the earth's surface. After working in underground labs in Canada and Japan, Berkeley Lab physicist Kevin Lesko saw Homestake as a way to make the U.S. the center of the underground physics world. More>