[jessriedel]

The surprising thing about high-energy-frontier accelerators is that, for the most part, groups aren't competing for beam time like they are at many other types of particle physics experiments. Roughly, they just hit the "Go" button on the machine, and collect data continuously. This data is then distributed to thousands of grad students, who sift through it looking for a million possible signals.

There is a caveat that the LHC does some heavy-ion collisions (the ALICE experiment), which takes about a month away from normal proton-proton collisions, but this isn't a big deal. I'm not sure about the Tevatron, but I don't think they have any other experiments besides D0 and CDF which could justify the operating expense.