The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority has approved spending $65 million to start constructing an underground laboratory at the Homestake gold mine in Lead.

"This is like a start-up company," science authority executive director Dave Snyder said Thursday. "We're going into the business of building, managing and operating an interim underground laboratory."

The "interim" laboratory will be 4,850 feet underground in the closed gold mine.

The National Science Foundation picked Homestake as the site for a proposed national underground science laboratory that would likely be 7,400 feet underground. But the deeper lab will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It also will require approval from the National Science Board, the White House and Congress, and it will take years to develop.

Experiments at the interim Homestake lab, however, could begin as early as next year.

Mine technicians already have re-entered Homestake, which had been sealed shut for four years. Crews have reached a depth of 2,150 feet underground in preparation for installing pumps to remove water that has slowly been filling the mine since 2003.

The science authority will hire 20 to 30 new employees in the next few months to help open the lab, Snyder said.

The $65 million comes from a number of sources:

* $35 million of a $70 million donation from philanthropist T. Denny Sanford. (Part of Sanford's donation also will be used to build an education center at the lab.)

* $20 million authorized by the state Legislature.

* $10 million from a federal Community Development Block Grant engineered by Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., nearly six years ago.

In July, the National Science Foundation awarded a consortium of scientists $15 million to develop a detailed proposal for the deeper national lab at Homestake.

The total of all money - federal, state and private - committed to the Homestake laboratory is about $130 million, and that doesn't count the value of the mine itself.

Gov. Mike Rounds negotiated the donation of the closed gold mine to the state by Homestake owner Barrick Gold Corp. of Toronto. In return, the state bought insurance and established a fund to protect the company from liability for the lab.

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com