Comment by divbzero

Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and heaters are at the lowest.

NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of experiments performed while everyone is available to do so. We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL without any days off until we were done.

Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while they're up.