For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular cult

For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular culture) that are in use today. They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.