How this works depends on the department that's funding the research. With NSF/NIH grants, it's at the desecration of researchers on whether they want to apply IP rights. Other departments (mostly DoD) do contracts for research and own the IP afterward, but I'd bet DoE is in the former camp.
The specific contract with the DoE may have defined ownership and distribution of the results, but in general it should be possible for the creators to get IP ownership from the DoE if for example they want to create a company around the technology.
