DUSEL, the underground lab proposed for the Homestake mine in South Dakota, was orphaned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in December, when its board balked at the huge costs of building and operating the lab. On Tuesday, physicists advising the Department of Energy (DOE) learned what it would cost if their agency were to become the surrogate parent.

Jay Marx of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena presented the advisory panel with the results of a committee charged with evaluating the costs of the DOE going it alone at Homestake.

The committee Marx co-chaired looked at the costs associated with three major experiments: the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), which would begin with a neutrino beam shot from Fermilab, 1,300 kilometres away; a dark matter experiment, which would require underground quiet to sift rare dark matter particles from background noise; and a neutrino-less double beta decay experiment, which would seek to determine the absolute, rather than just relative, mass of the neutrino.

All told, Marx says, the three experiments could be built at Homestake for about $2 billion. Operating costs would be on the order of $25 million a year (excluding the costs of operating LBNE at Fermilab). DOE Office of Science director Bill Brinkman says he will use the figures in the next couple of months as he puts together the agency’s budget request for the 2013 fiscal year.

Fermilab director Pier Oddone was in attendance at the meeting; he says LBNE is “critical” to the future of both his lab and the field. With the Tevatron shutting down by October, Oddone needs to develop replacement missions like LBNE. He likes LBNE because the proton source that drives the neutrino beam could eventually be upgraded into the driver beam for Project X — Fermilab’s plans to explore rare decays and even a muon collider, a possible successor to the Large Hadron Collider.

The subtext to this shift in stewardship is that, prior to today, the NSF and DOE had been rearing DUSEL from infancy with their parental roles reversed. The NSF funds science experiments; it views itself as a grant-making agency. The DOE, on the other hand, is an agency that likes to build and operate laboratories and facilities.

And so a lot of scientists watched on with puzzlement the last few years, as the two agencies went ahead planning DUSEL with the NSF as the primary operator and with the DOE as one of the major funders of experiments. “I never understood the way it was set up,” says Marx. “It seemed to me to be a mismatch between the traditional roles the agencies play.” Marx says righting those roles could go a long way towards resurrecting the underground lab.