Washington

Plans to build an underground physics laboratory in an abandoned gold-mine in South Dakota are close to collapse this week amidst quarrelling between its advocates, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and its owner, mining company Barrick Gold.

Barrick says it will now allow the Homestake mine near Lead to begin filling with water, claiming that it was shut out of an NSF panel charged with determining the best conditions for a deep underground laboratory (see Nature 423, 578; 2003). A meeting on 9 June between company officials and South Dakota's congressional delegation failed to persuade the company to reverse its decision.

Congressional sources say that Barrick was displeased with the NSF panel report, released last month, that endorsed Homestake as the best site for the lab. The report warned that if Homestake filled with water, which flows naturally into the mine at a rate of several hundred gallons per minute, this could substantially raise the cost. The panel said it was “unanimous in the opinion that continuing to pump is the most desirable option”.

A spokesman for Barrick, which has been under a court order to spend about $250,000 a month to pump out the mine, denied that the company was angry at the recommendation. But the spokesman, Vince Borg, did say that the company was not allowed to present its case to the NSF panel. “We had up-to-date, accurate, current information we wanted to share with them,” he says. “We didn't understand the decision of the panel.”

Within three days of the report's release on 30 May, Barrick announced that it would let the mine flood. This move triggered a letter from many leading physicists, including Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, urging Barrick to keep pumping.

Some in Congress see the mine as a boon to Barrick and a blight to the federal government. Under a 2001 law, the government must assume all environmental liability for the mine if a laboratory is built there.

But Alfred Mann, a physicist emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is still hopeful that an agreement can be worked out. “This lab would be one of the most important underground laboratories in the world,” he says.