40 Fun Facts About U.S. Department of Energy

A herd of which animals roams Fermilab, the Department of Energy's particle physics laboratory on the Illinois prairie?

Bison arrived with the lab's first director, Robert Wilson, who brought a bull and four cows to the site. Some neighbors wrongly suspected the herd was a living radiation alarm.

Which Texas governor forgot the Department of Energy's name in a 2011 debate, then ran it six years later?

Rick Perry blanked on the third agency he wanted to scrap during a Republican primary debate. In 2017 he took charge of that very department under Donald Trump.

A Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist built one of the first video games in 1958 to simulate which sport?

Tennis for Two was played on a small oscilloscope screen, and hundreds of visitors lined up for a turn. Brookhaven is now one of the Department of Energy's national labs.

Sandia National Laboratories, an Energy Department weapons lab, shares its name with the Spanish word for which fruit?

Watermelon is "sandía" in Spanish, and the lab borrowed the name from the nearby Sandia Mountains, which are said to glow that color at sunset.

Which folk singer was hired in 1941 to write songs promoting the Bonneville Power Administration's river dams?

Woody Guthrie wrote 26 songs in a single month on the job, among them "Roll On, Columbia". The agency he sang for now sits inside the Department of Energy.

Which radioactive metal, supplied by the Department of Energy, powers NASA's Curiosity rover and both Voyager probes?

Plutonium-238 gives off steady heat as it decays, and a generator turns that heat into electricity for decades, far from the Sun where solar panels would starve.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, America's emergency oil stockpile, is stored underground along the Gulf Coast in what?

Salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas hold the oil, each one hollowed out by drilling down and dissolving the rock with water. The Department of Energy runs the reserve.

Mushroom clouds from what is now a Department of Energy test site were a 1950s tourist attraction in which city?

Las Vegas lies about 65 miles from the Nevada desert test site, and the distant clouds could be seen from its downtown hotels. The city also felt the ground shake.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the first director of which New Mexico laboratory, now owned by the Department of Energy?

Los Alamos was a remote boys' ranch school until Oppenheimer suggested it for the secret bomb lab. In 2022 the Energy Secretary voided the 1954 ruling that stripped his clearance.

Which landmark 1990s biology effort did the Department of Energy launch jointly with the National Institutes of Health?

The Human Genome Project grew out of a 1986 Santa Fe workshop organized by Department of Energy officials, and it finished in 2003, two years ahead of schedule.

Which president signed the law creating the Department of Energy in 1977, during his first year in office?

Jimmy Carter proposed the department to promote conservation, energy independence and alternatives to fossil fuels, and pushed to have it running within months of taking office.

Which president pledged to abolish the Department of Energy just four years after it opened, but never managed it?

Ronald Reagan made the pledge in 1981 and even picked a former oral surgeon to run the place, yet the department outlasted his presidency.

Which 1973 shock, which left American drivers queuing at gas stations, led to the Department of Energy's creation?

An oil embargo by Arab exporters sent fuel prices soaring and showed how scattered federal energy policy was; four years later it was gathered into one department.

Which Energy Secretary under Barack Obama was the first person to join the Cabinet after winning a Nobel Prize?

Steven Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for a way of cooling and trapping atoms, then ran the department for the whole of Obama's first term.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist, helped negotiate a 2015 nuclear deal with which country?

Iran sent its own MIT-educated nuclear chief to the talks, so the two scientists could thrash out the technical details face to face.

The Department of Energy helps design the reactors that power the Navy's aircraft carriers and which other vessels?

Submarines came first: wartime boats could stay under for only hours or days on batteries, and a Navy team led by Hyman Rickover saw reactors as the cure.

Frontier and El Capitan, built for Department of Energy laboratories, have each ranked as the world's fastest what?

Supercomputer Frontier became the first machine to break the exascale barrier in 2022, topping a billion billion calculations a second.

Which electric carmaker took a $465 million Department of Energy loan in 2010 and repaid it in full?

Tesla put the money toward the Model S sedan, at a time when the young company's only car was a low-volume electric sports car.

Which label for power-saving appliances did the EPA launch in 1992, at first only for computers and their displays?

Energy Star spread from office electronics to fridges, televisions, light bulbs and whole buildings, and in 2026 the Department of Energy was named its lead agency.

Which state is home to Oak Ridge, the Manhattan Project's secret city and now site of a Department of Energy lab?

Tennessee's governor tore up the 1943 proclamation that put Oak Ridge beyond state control when a junior Army officer handed it to him.

Which Nevada site did Congress pick in 1987 as America's permanent underground store for spent reactor fuel?

Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress in 2002 but lost its federal funding in 2011, so the Department of Energy's repository has never taken in any waste.

Which Washington State site, which fueled the Nagasaki bomb, is now the nation's largest environmental cleanup?

Hanford's reactors line the Columbia River, and the Department of Energy's effort to deal with their leftover waste employs more than 10,000 workers.

In which state is Arco, which made history in 1955 when a government reactor alone supplied all of its electricity?

Idaho's desert is also where a reactor lit four light bulbs in 1951, an early first for nuclear electricity; the site is now a Department of Energy national laboratory.

Which single letter names the Department of Energy clearance needed to see top-secret nuclear weapons data?

Q clearance matches the Pentagon's Top Secret level, and the anonymous poster behind the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed to hold one.

Which Wyoming oil field, at the center of a 1920s bribery scandal, did the Department of Energy sell off in 2015?

Teapot Dome earned the government more than $569 million from 22 million barrels of oil before the department sold the field for $45 million.

The National Ignition Facility, a Department of Energy fusion experiment, fires 192 of what at a tiny fuel pellet?

Lasers at the facility made history in December 2022, when a fusion shot released about one and a half times the energy the beams had delivered.

The buffer zone around Rocky Flats, a Colorado plant that built bomb cores for the Department of Energy, is now what?

A wildlife refuge with elk, mule deer and prairie dogs now rings the site, while the fenced core where the factory stood stays closed in the department's care.

In the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, teams of college students compete to design and build what?

Houses from fourteen student teams stood on the National Mall in Washington for the first contest in 2002, and the public could walk through them for free.

Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of Energy under Joe Biden, had earlier served two terms as governor of which state?

Michigan elected her its first female governor in 2002, although she was born in Vancouver, Canada, and moved to California at the age of four.

Which Clinton Cabinet member was the first woman and first African American to serve as Secretary of Energy?

Hazel O'Leary opened Cold War files showing that the government had run secret radiation experiments on unsuspecting American citizens.

Which former CIA director and Secretary of Defense became the first Secretary of Energy in 1977?

James Schlesinger was a Republican serving a Democratic president, who replaced him in 1979 as part of a wider Cabinet shake-up.

Which civilian agency took over the Manhattan Project's bomb-building work in 1947 and held it until the 1970s?

The Atomic Energy Commission moved the bomb from military to civilian hands, and its weapons work later passed to the new Department of Energy.

Which Pentagon agency, which seeded the internet, inspired the Department of Energy's high-risk research arm?

DARPA's habit of backing risky, high-reward projects was copied for energy as ARPA-E, which funds research that might otherwise never be pursued.

The Department of Energy's Washington headquarters is named after which man, the first Secretary of Defense?

James Forrestal's building went up in the 1960s to house military staff and was nicknamed the Little Pentagon before the new department moved in.

Argonne, America's first national laboratory, grew out of wartime nuclear reactor work at which university?

Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory built the world's first reactor in 1942 under the stands of the university's sports stadium.

Ernest Lawrence built what is now Berkeley Lab around which particle accelerator, his Nobel-winning invention?

Cyclotron experience let Lawrence's team work out how to enrich uranium with electromagnets for the wartime bomb effort. His lab is now a Department of Energy site.

The first web server outside Europe went live in 1991 at a Department of Energy physics lab run by which university?

Stanford's lab is built around a two-mile linear accelerator that was once described as the world's straightest object.

On the Department of Energy's official seal, which gold symbol cuts across the green shield beneath an eagle's head?

A lightning bolt splits the shield, which also carries a sun, an atom, an oil derrick, a windmill and a dynamo to stand for different kinds of energy.

Chris Wright, who became Secretary of Energy in 2025, built his career on which method of extracting oil and gas?

Fracking made his firm, Liberty Energy, the second largest of its kind in North America, and in 2019 he drank the fluid it uses to argue that it was not dangerous.

Which physicist, nicknamed the father of the hydrogen bomb, co-founded the Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory?

Edward Teller lobbied hard for a second American weapons lab, joined it when it opened in 1952 and later served as its director. It is now a Department of Energy site.