Refurbishing the three-story-tall rock crushing system next to the Ross headframe it was last used in 2001 when the Ross Shaft was still used by the Homestake gold mine.Strengthening the Ross headframe-the structure that holds and operates the hoist that conveys the skips filled with rock to the surface.Renovating the area at the bottom of the mile-deep Ross Shaft, where rock will be loaded into large buckets, called skips, that will travel up the shaft.But other pre-excavation work remains to be done. Fortunately, the mile-deep shaft that workers will use to bring rock to the surface-known as the Ross Shaft-already exists and the seven-year-long shaft renovation project will soon wrap up. And creating the infrastructure for that job is a huge amount of work by itself-and is going on right now.
These caverns will house DUNE’s massive particle detectors and the necessary utilities.Įxcavating such an enormous amount of rock a mile underground, bringing it to the surface, and then transporting it to its final resting place is a huge job. The excavation will create the three LBNF caverns that vary in length between 500 and 625 feet long, up to 70 feet wide and 95 feet tall. The excavation of LBNF/DUNE caverns requires the transport of about 800,000 tons of rock from a mile underground to the surface, and then transporting it to its final resting place in a former mining area known as the Open Cut. (Prep work for the Illinois-portion of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, to be built at Fermilab, will start early next year.) These trucks are owned by the company Kiewit, part of the Kiewit-Alberici Joint Venture, who are preparing the construction site at Sanford Lab for the excavation of about 800,000 tons of rock to create the huge caverns for the South Dakota-portion of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. The LBNF construction in Lead, South Dakota is under way, and a fleet of yellow pickup trucks has become the talk of the town and evidence of the beehive of construction activity that Fermilab is managing at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
However, before the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab, can start solving those mysteries, a massive construction project is required to provide the necessary infrastructure, named the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. Unlocking the mysteries of neutrinos in order to get a clearer picture of the universe and understand why we are here at all, is a monumental undertaking.
0 kommentar(er)
