Nuclear Museum Logo
Nuclear Museum Logo

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.

Related Profiles

Tom Carpenter

Hanford, WA

Tom Carpenter is a lawyer and the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy organization focused on the Hanford Nuclear Site.

William “Willy” Higinbotham

Los Alamos, NM

William “Willy” Higinbotham (1910-1994) was an American physicist. During the war, Higinbotham worked at Los Alamos as leader of the Electronics Group in the Weapon Physics Division.

Colleen Frahm Lockmiller

Oak Ridge, TN

Colleen Frahm Lockmiller was a lab technician in the Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee from 1944 to 1947.

W. C. Funk

Oak Ridge, TN

Funk worked in the United States Engineer District Office.