Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.

He was the son of Herbert C. Graves, an engineer with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace after World War I. Graves attended Eastern High School and graduated at the top of his class from the University of Virginia in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

He received a graduate fellowship to the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D., writing his thesis on "Packing Fraction Differences Among Heavy Elements".

Graves had already received a request from the MIT Radiation Laboratory to work on radar, and he asked if he could contribute more to Compton's project.

[1] He joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory, and helped build the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.

[1] Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident at Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin.

Graves, who was nearest to Slotin, suffered an estimated dose of 390 roentgens,[12] and was given a 50 percent chance of survival.

Two years later he and his wife had a healthy child, their second,[5][11] a son they named Alvin Palmer (currently a chemistry lecturer at Florida International University).

[3] He played in the Los Alamos Symphony, accompanying local performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and Handel's Messiah.

[5] Graves died of a heart attack on July 19, 1965, while skiing in Del Norte, Colorado, twenty years after the Slotin accident, at the age of 55.