DUNE Lowers 10 Million Pounds of Steel 4,850 Feet for 2 Giant Cryogenic Tanks
Updated
Updated · autonocion.com · Jul 30
DUNE Lowers 10 Million Pounds of Steel 4,850 Feet for 2 Giant Cryogenic Tanks
1 articles · Updated · autonocion.com · Jul 30
Summary
Crews at South Dakota’s former Homestake gold mine are sending 10 million pounds of DUNE structural steel 4,850 feet underground this summer to build frames for two massive detector tanks.
Every component must travel through the rehabilitated Ross Shaft on a custom 60-foot-high cage; a 43-foot, 15,890-pound beam took about 18 minutes in an April full-scale test, and roughly 2,100 pieces must make the trip.
The steel will support two cryostats measuring 216 by 62 by 60 feet, each designed to hold 17,000 tons of liquid argon at about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit using LNG-style membrane technology supplied through CERN.
CERN provided the steel as an in-kind contribution that Fermilab says is its first infrastructure investment in an experiment outside Europe, while U.S. labs are building magnets for CERN’s collider upgrade in return.
The underground build is part of Fermilab’s plan to send the first neutrino beam 800 miles from Illinois to South Dakota by 2031, after earlier delays forced the Department of Energy to split the megaproject into phases.