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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Dale Babcock

Physical ChemistHanford, WA

EngineerManhattan Project VeteranScientist
The first large-scale nuclear reactor in history, the B-Reactor, in Hanford, Washington Listen to Dale Babcock’s Oral History on Voices of the Manhattan Project

Dale Babcock was a physical chemist and colleague of Crawford Greenewalt. Greenewalt took Babcock and a few other close DuPont colleagues with him into the new world of atomic energy. Babcock became an expert on nuclear reactors and also did research on heavy water, an expensive and difficult alternative for graph­ite in reactor operation.

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