Medical facilities fret about lack of radioactive-waste disposal sites.

A number of businesses in Los Angeles County, including some major research hospitals, are up in arms over the dwindling number of options for disposing of their low-level radioactive waste and the numerous obstacles to getting a new nuclear waste site built in the Mojave Desert.

"It's a very tenuous position for the state to be depending on biotech firms to pull the state out of the recession, but the state's not doing anything to keep them here," said Donna Earley, chairwoman of the California Radioactive Materials Forum, which represents 120 companies in California producing radioactive waste. "Biotech firms are screaming and moving to Oregon, Nevada and Washington."

Los Angeles County is being particularly hard hit by the radioactive waste disposal crunch because it is home to companies that have 500 of the 2,200 radioactive-material-user permits in California, said Steve Romano, vice president and manager of California operations for US Ecology Inc., a Houston-based company that the state has tentatively picked to build and operate the proposed Mojave nuclear waste site. Several hundred of the radioactive waste generators in L.A. County are hospitals or health care-related companies, said Romano.

Since the nuclear waste dumps in Beatty, Nev., and Richland, Wash., were closed to California companies as of Jan. 1, these companies have been either sending their waste to a site in Barnswell, S.C., or storing the waste on site.

Earley said the problem with sending the waste to South Carolina is that it costs $3,000 a barrel, five times the $600 a barrel it had cost to send waste to Nevada or Washington. What's more, companies are concerned about possible liability arising from disposing their waste in South Carolina. That concern stems from the fact that toxic waste once leaked radiation into the groundwater under the Barnswell site, said Earley.

With South Carolina stating it will stop accepting radioactive waste after July 1994, California companies face the prospect of having to store their waste on site for years until the Mojave Desert nuclear waste site can be built. But a great deal of uncertainty still confronts that proposal.

Gov. Pete Wilson ordered the Department of Health Services to decide by June 5 whether or not to grant US Ecology a license for the dump.

Once a license is granted, the U.S. Department of the Interior must transfer the 1,000-acre desert site to the state before construction of the low-level nuclear waste dump can begin. The proposed dump site is near the Colorado River, in an area known as Ward Valley.

Standing in the way of the land transfer are a number of legal obstacles.

One of the largest such obstacles stems from a ruling made earlier this month by the state Court of Appeal. That ruling was that the state does not have to hold additional hearings to address safety and liability issues at the dump. However, the Senate Rules Committee has announced that it plans to appeal that ruling.

Two federal lawsuits are also pending to block the land transfer on environmental grounds because the proposed dump would allegedly pose a threat to the desert tortoise, a threatened species which inhabits the Ward Valley area. The State Lands Commission, with the backing of state Controller Gray Davis, has also vowed to block the land transfer.

US Ecology's Romano said he is confident that the site will be transformed into a dump because "the state courts are on our side." But he added: "We are several years away from getting the site opened because of legal appeals."

What this means is that scores of Los Angeles companies, and those throughout the state, will have to store their waste on site, often in urban areas, and then dispose of it at the high cost being charged by the South Carolina dump.

Every month of delay is costing US Ecology more than $500,000, Romano said, and those costs will be passed on to universities, biotech companies and hospitals.

Due to mounting legal costs, the projected cost of disposing waste at the Mojave site has now increased to about $2,500 a barrel, double the original projection.

"It's frustrating to watch this happen," said Earley about the struggle to get the site constructed. "Millions have been spent in pushing for the site, and we don't even have a hole in the ground."

Earley, who is also director of radiation and environmental safety at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said that hospital, which disposes of about 100 barrels of radioactive waste a year, is currently storing the waste on site. She said the hospital will run out of space by August, so efforts are being made to find additional storage space and to restrict the use of radiation.