America's Department of Energy spends much of its time on nuclear weapons
The name suggests power plants and petrol prices, but the US Department of Energy also runs the military's nuclear weapons programme and builds reactors for the Navy. It funds more physical science than any other federal agency, and it gave birth to the Human Genome Project. Its roots lie in the wartime race for the atomic bomb.
That lineage starts in 1942 with the Manhattan Project, run by the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, an Atomic Energy Commission took charge of the programme and laid the framework for the first National Laboratories, still the backbone of the department's research. In 1974 Congress split the commission's roles, handing regulation of civilian nuclear power to a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission and research to a separate energy agency.
The 1973 oil crisis, with its shortages and inflation, convinced Jimmy Carter that energy policy needed a single home. He signed the law creating the department in his first year, and it opened on 1 October 1977, absorbing several agencies including the Federal Power Commission. Carter wanted it to push conservation, energy independence and alternatives to fossil fuels. Its first secretary was James Schlesinger, previously defence secretary under Nixon and Ford.
Guarding nuclear secrets has brought painful episodes. In 1999 the Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was publicly named as a suspect in passing weapons designs to China before any charges were filed. Of 59 counts eventually brought, all but one were dropped once investigators decided the leaked plans could not have come from him. The affair prompted Congress to create the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-independent agency inside the department.
The department has also become a major lender. A 2005 law allowed it to guarantee loans for projects using new technologies that cut pollution or greenhouse gases, and in December 2024 it announced its biggest loan yet, $15 billion to help Pacific Gas and Electric modernise hydroelectric plants and power lines. Its headquarters sit in the Forrestal Building in Washington.
Source: United States Department of Energy
