While women accounted for less than 1 percent of the managers and supervisors at Hanford in the early 1940s, Hanford might never have existed if not for the work of some key women scientists.

Best known is Marie Curie, who with her husband, Pierre, discovered two radioactive elements, radium and polonium, in 1898.

For many years, radium was used in luminescent paints, as a neutron source for research and in the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

Today, cobalt-60 and cesium-137 are more generally used in cancer treatment.

The much rarer polonium was named after her native country, Poland.

Marie Curie shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for those discoveries and won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911 after helping to isolate metallic radium.

Her daughter, Irene Joliot Curie, later continued her research into radioactivity and also won a Nobel Prize, said Wanda Munn, senior engineer at Westinghouse Hanford.

The Curies' work triggered the fascination of an Austrian physicist and mathematician, Lise Meitner.

In the early 1900s, Meitner's work brought her to Berlin to study with renowned German physicists and to experiment with the radioactivity of atoms.

While trying to repeat the experiments of Enrico Fermi to free the energy within the nucleus of an atom, she and two other scientists created a heavy form of uranium.

But Meitner was puzzled over instances when they bombarded an atom and created lighter elements, rather than heavier ones, Munn said.

To help in their observations, Meitner and co-worker, Otto Hahn of Germany, devised an "atomic microscope."

In the middle of their research, Meitner, a Jew and anti-Fascist, fled Germany, though the Nazis were willing to allow her to continue her work for them.

In 1938, she escaped to Holland, then to Sweden. There, while talking with her nephew, Otto Frisch, she realized she had been splitting uranium atoms.

The process and the resulting release of atomic energy was later coined fission, the phenomenon that makes nuclear power and nuclear bombs possible.

Word spread immediately through the scientific community and in less than five years, Fermi would be at Hanford for B Reactor's initial startup.

The first woman and the youngest member of Fermi's team on the Manhattan Project was Leona Woods Marshall, a young physicist.

Marshall was a child prodigy who graduated from an Illinois high school at age 15. While studying chemistry at the University of Chicago, she became involved with the Manhattan Project.

She lived in Richland about 1H years during construction of B Reactor - which made plutonium for the world's first atomic blast in the New Mexico desert and for the Nagasaki bomb.

Marshall performed many test calculations for improving the reactor's performance.

Munn said rumor had it B Reactor has a woman's bathroom because of Marshall since it wasn't for many more years that women were hired to work in the reactor.

In 1945, Meitner, a pacifist, was heartbroken to learn about the atomic bomb, Munn said.

Still, U.S. news accounts carried glowing tributes to her. Eleanor Roosevelt also praised Meitner three days after Japan's bombing.

Meitner, then 68, responded: "Women have a great responsibility and they are obliged to try, so far as they can, to prevent another war.

"I hope that the construction of the atom bomb not only will help to finish this awful war, but that we will be able, too, to use this great energy that has been released for peaceful work."