The infrastructure and Major Facilities Access (MFA) grant, under which the CMMS at TRIUMF operates, imposes strict guidelines as to which costs its funds can and cannot be applied. Specifically, these funds can only be used for operating and maintaining the facility infrastructure. No direct research support, recoverable consumables, or new facility installations are allowed from this grant.
Clearly, these items are needed for the facility to operate smoothly, and the terms of the grant address this need by requiring that direct user fees be assessed to cover those costs.
In practice, the MFA grant does not cover all the MFA-eligible costs of the CMMS facility, so not only must the non-MFA costs be made up in user fees, but the user fees must also supplement the MFA-eligible costs.
Therefore, all liquid helium costs are directly passed on to the user and will appear as a liquid He charge against their TRIUMF account. Furthermore, when a group utilizes any of the facility resources, a user fee is assessed. In those cases where high intensity beam is provided to an experiment, the beam delivered will determine the amount of the user fee. On the other hand, when facility resources are used in the absence of beam, an ad-hoc assessment will be made by the facility manager.