Manhattan Project Pioneer Dies At Age 91

Oswald Greager, who helped design the process that separated plutonium from irradiated uranium for the Manhattan Project, died Sunday. He was 91.

In 1944-45, Greager - then a U.S. Army major with a doctorate in chemistry - helped create the complicated technology that used chemicals to extract weapons-making material at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation’s B Reactor.

He left the Army in 1946, joined General Electric in 1947 and went back to work at Hanford, where he was placed in charge of the technical aspects of chemical separation work.