The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) challenges and opportunities for the rock engineering community

The construction of a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) is being proposed under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). DUSEL will provide the underground research community with purpose-built and outfitted facilities capable of supporting a broad spectrum of research to depths in excess of two kilometers. DUSEL will be of particular interest and value to the rock engineering community because it will offer a rare opportunity to conduct fundamental and applied research within a dedicated subsurface facility. DUSEL will allow engineers to design and conduct experiments that can address long-standing fundamental questions on rock mass behavior, and to support comprehensive evaluations of equipment and material performance, in situ, under monitored and/or controlled environmental conditions. Such research opportunities are seldom offered within the context of an individual mining or tunneling project, where research scope is necessarily limited to addressing site-specific issues of feasibility, cost and risk. DUSEL research partners are physicists, biologists and geoscientists. Partner proposals currently being developed call for a network of shafts and tunnels that will provide access to experimental area excavations. As currently planned, these excavations would range in span from roughly three to sixty metres. The Project is still in the planning stage. However, the initial experimental program is taking shape and conceptual designs are underway at two hard rock mine sites. This paper will focus on introducing the project to the international rock engineering community and outline potential elements of a diverse research program that could be undertaken at the DUSEL.