Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy was a pre-War department of the United States.

Background
The Department of Energy was a cabinet-level institution that held the utmost power regarding policies of safe handling of nuclear waste and other potentially hazardous material. Responsibilities included the nation's nuclear weapons program, energy conservation, energy-related research, radioactive waste disposal, domestic energy production, and mining of radioactive resources.

One of the responsibilities of the DoE was nuclear waste disposal. All across America are disposal sites managed by the DoE to ensure the proper disposal of that nuclear waste, such as Federal Disposal Field HZ-21. However, not all disposal sites are as they appear. One such site is the Emmett Mountain disposal site. On paper, this site is just like all the others (with some severe cost reduction in terms of construction material) but was a joint cover-up between both the DoE and West Tek for disposing of failed FEV subjects from the West Tek research center experiments on the residents of Huntersville. The hope of this cover-up was two-fold, to both conceal the evidence of any human experimentation and to monitor the side effects of FEV infected corpses on controlled sample size.

The Department of Energy is also responsible for the mining of uranium ore at federal mines like the Blackwater Mine. Spearheaded by Dr. Phillip Cotton of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, Blackwater Mine was also a test case for the automation of mining. The staff of 50 individuals, plus the foreman Mitchell Hibbs, were hired to mine the uranium while robots would be slowly introduced into the process. Layoffs would precede the introduction of the robots until no staff would remain, but the foreman and miners were positive that the robots were only there to make mining easier. The experiment in automation was a resounding success for Cotton and the DoE. Automation outpaced the yield that the previous miners could accomplish and all remaining human workers were replaced with automated robots, including the foreman.

Appearances
The Department of Energy is mentioned in Fallout 76 and the Fallout Bible.

Behind the scenes

 * The United States Department of Energy is based on the real world federal agency of the same name.
 * In the Fallout Bible, developers comments that the Department of Energy was given a ZAX unit by Vault-Tec. It was used by the DoE to collect resource data until it was commandeered by the United States Military for research into New Plague and tactical development.