Last May, when South Carolina officials shut down the Barnwell radioactive waste disposal site, Harvard officials panicked briefly--and then began shipping the University's sludge out to Hanford, Washington.

Those officials were stricken with a strange sense of de ja vu this week, when Washington Gov. Dixie Lee Ray shut down the Hanford site, claiming that federal agencies were not properly monitoring shipments of the hazardous materials.

Ray closed the site after a spot check revealed that three of nine trucks carrying waste into her state were violating safety procedures. The site, she said, would remain closed until officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Department of Transportation--the agencies charged with hazardous materials transportation-strengthened their protective measures.

At Harvard, where about 40 per cent of medical research produces such wastes, officials are scared. "If this continues," our whole research program will be thrown into confusion," Jacob A. Shapiro, radiation officer in the University's environmental health and safety office, said yesterday.

Officials estimate that research could continue at normal rates for about a week--and if the problems isn't solved by then, then some projects may have to be temporarily stopped.

Spokesmen for Interex Corporation which hauled 100,000 gallons of Harvard-generated low-level waste in 1978, said yesterday they hear the shutdown will only be temporary.

In Washington, a NRC spokesman still had no comment. But everyone agrees the situation is serious: the only other possible site--located in the wilds of Beattie, Nevada--is closed to new customers. "If you haven't shipped to it before," said an Interex spokesman, "you can't start now."

And while federal officials struggle to tighten security measures, University officials wait patiently. Shapiro perhaps best summed up the situation: "I feel sick to my stomach," he joked.