Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm Farewell Remarks as Delivered to National Labs

I see we’ve got all of the Labs online—hey everybody! So, so grateful that you’re able to participate across the country. 

I’ve had the privilege, now, of visiting all 17 of the [National] Labs, both in person and virtually. So excited that we were able to make this happen. So excited to be able to do this bit of a retrospective here at Ames. And thank you for the welcome. 

I’m excited because we are—for the folks who are beaming in from across the country, I don’t know if they mentioned this—but we’re in this room named for Frank Spedding, the first director of this lab. 

And he and I actually have a few things in common. We were both born in Canada, we both lived in Michigan, we both taught at UC Berkeley. He has me beat in the number of Nobel Prize nominations, 8-0. But nonetheless, maybe there’s time to catch up. 

Frank spent the bulk of his time, his career, at Ame. And he’d have these meetings—for those of you who are here, you know this, but for everybody who’s online—he would have these weekly meetings that his crew called “Speddinars.” And at these Speddinars, he’d ask this simple question, which is: “What have you been up to?” 

Today, we’ll borrow a bit of this practice from Frank, as we ask across decades, and across the country, across Labs: “What have you been up to?” 

And not to spoil the show, but I know it is mind boggling what your teams have been up to—obviously, not just in the last four years, but over the course of the scientific enterprise here at the Department of Energy and beyond, clearly.  

Your labs have played a role in some of the most important and grandest experiments of all time. Your fingerprints are all over our nation and our world, from the crops we grow, to the lighting overhead, to the materials that form buildings that are energy efficient, to the technology that allows me to speak right now to- I see NETL in Oregon. NREL in Colorado, I see you’re standing outside. I hope it’s not too cold! SLAC. And I think Sandia is joining us from California as well. Savannah River has joined us from South Carolina. And Fermi Lab in Virginia, all on screen. 

And what’s especially cool about discovery science, is that oftentimes, researchers have no idea where their research is going to lead, right? What is going to come of their work. 

During World War II, Frank Spedding’s colleagues pioneered means of uranium purification, for use in defense efforts, actually, at Los Alamos. And then decades later, we have Oak Ridge and PNNL who are exploring ways to extract uranium from the seawater in our oceans, which enables clean power through nuclear power. 

Technology used to make COVID-19 vaccines actually can be traced back to Brookhaven, where scientists there were studying an entirely different virus back in the 80s.  

A leading AIDS drug has roots at an Argonne x-ray facility. 

Lawrence Livermore's fusion breakthrough became reality two years ago, but started six decades ago of effort when lab scientists there were hypothesizing that you can fuse nuclei together with lasers. And meanwhile, over at Princeton Lab, they were taking a different innovative approach, which was how fusion can occur using magnets. 

Both of which, the people who have been working on these for decades, we keep saying that it’s just around the corner. Well, we’ve proven that it’s possible. And now we have all of these great fusion startups that are working in various ways to actually make it a reality—which I think will happen, I will say, in my lifetime. So therefore, all of your lifetimes! 

And I believe, right now, 140 million miles away, NASA’s Perseverance rover is searching for ancient life on Mars—with a power system that was assembled by INL scientists and fueled by a plutonium isotope that was first synthesized at Berkeley in the 40s. 

Scientists are the beginning, middle, and end of our work at the Department of Energy—every pore, every crevice. We are bound to scientists in an inextricable garment of destiny, as Dr. King might have said. 

We have a deeper understanding of the world around us—the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat—because of the work that is done by you all. 

DOE has been trumpeting, the last few months, we’ve been doing the rounds, saying what great things that have happened in the past four years. And one of the things we continue to talk about is that 400,000 people are now employed in clean energy.  

And those 400,000 people who are employed in clean energy are not just able to put food on the table, or maybe send their kids to college, or make their mortgage payments, but they're able to have those jobs because they may be manufacturing the technology that comes out of the Labs. 

People are alive today because doctors have prescribed treatments that were discovered in our Labs for diabetes, or cancer, or heart disease. 

I mean, it’s cool, right? It’s amazing that you’re working at a place where you make such an enormous difference. 

I don’t think people understand- they don’t look under the hood to see where those technologies come from. They just expect they’re going to work. 

But I just want you to know that I see you. I’m so grateful for you, so grateful for the past four years.  

There’s not many people who can say that they are doing great things at work that have value and addition to the world, and [help] put food on your table and put your kids through college. 

It is an amazing ability to work at this Department and solve the greatest issues and problems of our time. 

So now, I want to do something that you probably don’t get a chance to do much, which is: to listen to you brag about what you all have been up to, as Frank Spedding would say.