U.S. Department of Energy
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40 free U.S. Department of Energy trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The U.S. Department of Energy does far more than its name suggests. Alongside power research, it looks after the country's nuclear arsenal, runs a network of famous national laboratories and keeps an emergency stockpile of crude. That mix makes it a rich source of fun facts about the federal government. This quiz covers how the department was born, the scientists and politicians who have led it, the secret wartime sites it inherited, and the surprising places its work turns up, from deep space to the family kitchen. Expect early video games, grazing herds and a debate-night blunder along the way. It is written for curious readers, science fans, civics students and anyone who likes knowing what the government actually does. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a fact or two worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A herd of which animals roams Fermilab, the Department of Energy's particle physics laboratory on the Illinois prairie?
Bison
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.
Q 02Which Texas governor forgot the Department of Energy's name in a 2011 debate, then ran it six years later?
Rick Perry
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.
Q 03A Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist built one of the first video games in 1958 to simulate which sport?
Tennis
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.
Q 04Sandia National Laboratories, an Energy Department weapons lab, shares its name with the Spanish word for which fruit?
Watermelon
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.
Q 05Which folk singer was hired in 1941 to write songs promoting the Bonneville Power Administration's river dams?
Woody Guthrie
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.
Q 06Which radioactive metal, supplied by the Department of Energy, powers NASA's Curiosity rover and both Voyager probes?
Plutonium
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.
Q 07The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, America's emergency oil stockpile, is stored underground along the Gulf Coast in what?
Salt caverns
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.
Q 08Mushroom clouds from what is now a Department of Energy test site were a 1950s tourist attraction in which city?
Las Vegas
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.
Q 09J. Robert Oppenheimer was the first director of which New Mexico laboratory, now owned by the Department of Energy?
Los Alamos
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.
Q 10Which landmark 1990s biology effort did the Department of Energy launch jointly with the National Institutes of Health?
Human Genome Project
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.
Q 11Which president signed the law creating the Department of Energy in 1977, during his first year in office?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 12Which president pledged to abolish the Department of Energy just four years after it opened, but never managed it?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan made the pledge in 1981 and even picked a former oral surgeon to run the place, yet the department outlasted his presidency.
Q 13Which 1973 shock, which left American drivers queuing at gas stations, led to the Department of Energy's creation?
An oil embargo
Q 21Which Nevada site did Congress pick in 1987 as America's permanent underground store for spent reactor fuel?
Yucca Mountain
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.
Q 22Which Washington State site, which fueled the Nagasaki bomb, is now the nation's largest environmental cleanup?
Hanford
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.
Q 23In which state is Arco, which made history in 1955 when a government reactor alone supplied all of its electricity?
Idaho
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.
Q 14Which Energy Secretary under Barack Obama was the first person to join the Cabinet after winning a Nobel Prize?
Steven Chu
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.
Q 15Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist, helped negotiate a 2015 nuclear deal with which country?
Iran
Iran sent its own MIT-educated nuclear chief to the talks, so the two scientists could thrash out the technical details face to face.
Q 16The Department of Energy helps design the reactors that power the Navy's aircraft carriers and which other vessels?
Submarines
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.
Q 17Frontier and El Capitan, built for Department of Energy laboratories, have each ranked as the world's fastest what?
Supercomputer
Supercomputer Frontier became the first machine to break the exascale barrier in 2022, topping a billion billion calculations a second.
Q 18Which electric carmaker took a $465 million Department of Energy loan in 2010 and repaid it in full?
Tesla
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.
Q 19Which label for power-saving appliances did the EPA launch in 1992, at first only for computers and their displays?
Energy Star
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.
Q 20Which state is home to Oak Ridge, the Manhattan Project's secret city and now site of a Department of Energy lab?
Tennessee
Tennessee's governor tore up the 1943 proclamation that put Oak Ridge beyond state control when a junior Army officer handed it to him.
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.
Q 24Which single letter names the Department of Energy clearance needed to see top-secret nuclear weapons data?
Q
Q clearance matches the Pentagon's Top Secret level, and the anonymous poster behind the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed to hold one.
Q 25Which Wyoming oil field, at the center of a 1920s bribery scandal, did the Department of Energy sell off in 2015?
Teapot Dome
Teapot Dome earned the government more than $569 million from 22 million barrels of oil before the department sold the field for $45 million.
Q 26The National Ignition Facility, a Department of Energy fusion experiment, fires 192 of what at a tiny fuel pellet?
Lasers
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.
Q 27The buffer zone around Rocky Flats, a Colorado plant that built bomb cores for the Department of Energy, is now what?
A wildlife refuge
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.
Q 28In the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, teams of college students compete to design and build what?
Houses
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.
Q 29Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of Energy under Joe Biden, had earlier served two terms as governor of which state?
Michigan
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.
Q 30Which Clinton Cabinet member was the first woman and first African American to serve as Secretary of Energy?
Hazel O'Leary
Hazel O'Leary opened Cold War files showing that the government had run secret radiation experiments on unsuspecting American citizens.