World's deepest, largest underground lab operational | Hacker News Reader

World's deepest, largest underground lab operational

chinadaily.com.cn

84 points1970-01-0132 comments

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Missed opportunity in naming it.

I wish it was DA-URF. Then you could say we have a lab, it is deep in DA-URF.

Here is a video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i77k2H5gJwI

https://youtu.be/i77k2H5gJwI?t=34

Quite amazing how prevalent Windows XP is 22 years later

I hope it's either a completely offline computer or a Linux system with an XP theme to make it look more familiar to the users.

I worked in a very similar place a decade ago, and probably know a few of the major people involved here. Not that I've kept up with them.

The machines 10 years ago were on a LAN with limited access to the global (well, Chinese) Internet. It wasn't great but it wasn't terrible.

More troublingly, I would bet a large sum of money that there are Windows XP installs in this lab, and even pirate installs of LabView. I distinctly remember being onsite watching the guy next to me open up a NFO file to get the instructions for the LabView crack. At my station in one of the boxes I had a fully licensed multi-seat institutional LabView DVD set, paid for at staggering cost somewhere in the University hierarchy. I debated speaking up, but decided to just let him keep going on doing what he was doing. That was probably the right choice.

Maybe they patched it. But knowing Microsoft, i don't think so. (There are not enough people in China to patch the holes in the MS OS).

You can still pay for patches for Win2K if you pay MS well enough. There is a lot of critical infrastructure relying on legacy systems and Microsoft does have special programs for that.

Now whether China can get into them or not is another question since if they get patches they can RE the exploits as well…

The lede suggests that it is mainly for dark matter detection, but later on they say it is for interdisciplinary research including life sciences. Is this just due to the "ultra clean" capabilities, or are there other reasons why you would want to do life sciences research 7K feet underground?

(This is not China-bashing, as I assume lots of other nations do this for the same reasons.)

It's a lot harder to have unwanted intruders, and satellite surveillance is less likely. This lab will 100% have a military research purpose.

I don't think you need a mountain for that. A properly guarded surface complex with enclosed corridors between facilities would be far cheaper and enough to protect something from intruders or satellite surveillance. IIRC similar facilities (Cheyenne Complex, Zheleznogorsk MCC, Yamantaw) were built as nuclear strike resistant bunkers first. There are also nuclear waste storage facilities all over the world.

But a mountain would work, yes? And if you already need the mountain lab for physics, what is the extra cost to staff military personnel there?

Digging holes 2400 meters deep isn't exactly cheap, even for a country like China.

They didn't dig 2400m 'deep'. They dug into the sides of mountains which rise 2400m upwards from where they dug, as a side a effect from a construction site for water tunnels and their access-ways which would have been dug anyways for the adjacent dam and electricity generation site.

AFAIK nobody goes 'that deep' for science alone, it's always adjacent to mining, leftofer/unused/abandoned tunnels, and often closes down when the mining ceases, and the operation getting too expensive without the ongoing mining.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOLAB , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canfranc_Underground_Laborator... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Underground_Research_F... for some examples.

Just like Black Mesa!

That was a joke, haha, fat chance

I see you have not read/watched The Andromeda Strain.

I have a somewhat off-topic question: I know there are very few sites that are actually doomsday-proof, but could this lab, being 2400 meters deep in the ground, survive a direct hit from a ICBM (e.g. LGM-30 Minuteman) with a megaton yield?

Nice try, Chinese military.

About a hundred feet plus shock absorbers will suffice.

the TL;DR would be:

There is no place to hide anymore (nowadays).

A single hit? Probably.

But now imagine a series of bunker-busting MIRVs from a single ICBM arriving in sequence behind each other. Each one carving out a nice crater, for the next one to go even deeper.

A thermo-nuclear jackhammer.

With that jackhammering a few hundred kilotons per MIRV/hit would be sufficient, I guess. More would be wasted. Goes just up in the air.

Each ICBM carrying anything from a hand full, to a dozen(maybe even 20?) of such MIRVs.

Now, how many ICBMs would be needed? 2? 3? 5? 10?

Let's try! BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM... Yeee Haa!

That aside, this location has 2400m of mountain over it, but the access-ways are probably on the sides, way lower, not necessarily in some steep gorges.

Probably simpler to use them as starting point for the 'jackhammer', if only for the shockwaves of hot plasma to propagate more easily into the deeper structures along them, and wreaking havoc.

It's 4x deeper than Cheyenne Complex designed to survive direct hits from much more high yield Soviet nukes (to compensate for accuracy). I don't remember the course details, but US nuke modernization efforts is trying to improve detenation timing/penetration (not yield) for more effective bunker busting. IIRC there was some rough numbers attached to improved effective depth, but it was measured in 100s of feet.

It may sound counter-intuitive, to enter this lab, you are not going down, instead, you enter a 14 km long horizontal tunnel that pass through a mountain, and this deep underground lab sits in the middle of tunnel. That tunnel was built to transport materials to a hydro power plant construction site, later was repurposed for science.

Ancient windows is not uncommon as far as the instrument it controls still works. In fact, since some control software were developed for old windows, there is little reason to upgrade to latest windows.

HN readers may also be surprised the way physicists work is similar to software developing. Vim, emacs, vscode, git are used everyday. C++, Python, Golang, Postgres, docker to name a few. Almost all the heavy lifting happens on Linux. Debian, Ubuntu, sometimes CentOS, although I don't think people will use CentOS on new machines. Of course it is not just software, there are customized hardware too. From FPGA to huge vessel build with ultra-low radiation stainless steel, not to mention the underground lab itself.

Last time I heard, this lab is not just for China. It is a civilian facility and they welcome collaboration regardless one's origin. Frankly I am very surprise how supportive the Chinese government is to this kind of research. I cannot imagine how they could benefit from it economically or militarily.

A fantastic achievement.

To give this some scale: according to Wolfram Alpha, 2400m is 0.038% of the average distance from the earth's surface to its centre.

Its a deep planet as well as a big one.

https://archive.is/1xhYm

Surely there's a better acronym.

like DAMPE?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter_Particle_Explore...

They have tidied it up too. The Deep Underground and Ultra-low Radiation Background Facility for Frontier Physics Experiments - DUaUlRBFfFPE.

Sound good to me. Where is it? Deep in "DURF".

Looking at the images, I can't help to think of Umbrella corporation with deep underground safe testing labs with presently problematic lighting.

DURF is useful to distinguish it from a Deep Underground Military Base, or DUMB.

DURF means "dare" or "daring" in Dutch. Not s bad name imo.

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