You could say today's Hanford was a glimmer in two Berkeley, Calif., scientists' eyes in 1940.

That's the year chemists Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson, working in a University of California laboratory, created the element neptunium from uranium.

It was the 93rd element humankind discovered, and McMillan and Abelson thought the experiment showed clues a 94th element might exist.

With the United States edging toward World War II, the scientists switched to other defense research. However, their work intrigued a 28-year-old chemistry instructor named Glenn Seaborg, who contacted McMillan.

"I suggested I might carry his work on. He was delighted," Seaborg recalled.

For six months, Seaborg joined graduate student Arthur Wahl and assistant chemistry professor Joseph Kennedy in setting up various experiments that bombarded a solution containing uranium with particles from a cyclotron.

After midnight Feb. 25, 1941, in Room 307 of Berkeley's Gillman Hall, Wahl finished tests that showed alpha radiation readings indicating a new element, invisible in the solution.

It was plutonium.

"I felt pretty pleased that we were making this progress. I didn't stop to ruminate whether we were changing the history of the world. I didn't have that perspective at that time. ... Now I know it was a very important moment," said Seaborg, now 83.

The chemists told only a few other scientists about their discovery.

"We didn't tell anyone else. We kept it voluntarily a secret. We sent the information by letter to Washington, D.C. They already had a uranium committee interested in uranium as a source of a energy," Seaborg said.

The chemists worked to isolate plutonium 239, the isotope capable of having its atoms split.

"We saw it had the potential for an atomic bomb. It was beginning to dawn on us," Seaborg recalled.

For the next several months, Seaborg and his colleagues studied plutonium and experimented with how to isolate and extract it.

Their work was drawn into the Manhattan Project - the secret U.S. race to build an atomic bomb before the Germans did.

Seaborg went to the project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago in April 1942. The challenge was to determine how to produce kilograms of a substance that so far had been produced only in submicroscopic quantities.

Finally, the lab managed to produce one-millionth of an ounce of plutonium oxide -barely visible under a powerful microscope.

Gen. Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, visited the lab.

"We put (the plutonium) under the microscope with a lot of pride. And he just sort of looked down through the microscope and said he couldn't see a thing," Seaborg said.

By the end of 1942, the lab had produced 500 micrograms of plutonium. That's 0.0005 gram, or just under 0.00002 ounce.

A paper clip weighs 2,000 times as much.

At Hanford, workers already began to race to complete the plants that would increase production by millions of times.