WASHINGTON GOV. DIXY LEE RAY is one tough woman. Very early on the morning of October 4--as the haze lifted over Olympia--she was tougher than usual. Standing in front of a small group of reporters, Ray announced that she had shut down the Hanford, Wash., radioactive waste dumping site. A spot check of trucks carrying sludge into the state had revealed serious violations of federal regulations on transporting hazardous materials.

Ray's voice rose, according to observers, as she described her futile attempts to contact Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) officials the night before. She said she made "extensive efforts" to reach the NRC "but there was no one there, there was no emergency number and no 24-hour manning" like there used to be. An indignant Ray said she considered the situation "incomprehensible" and with a less-than-discreet reference to Three Mile Island, reminded the NRC that "emergencies do occur."

But Ray, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, should really not have been surprised by the NRC's seeming indifference. As she must know only too well, waste disposal is one of those problems that nobody in Washington wants responsibility for. A variety of inter agency reports and meetings have addressed the problems, but most of them are gathering dust on agency shelves. Up and down the Potomac, in fact, they're trying to sidestep the problem. Reactors and laboratories are generating hazardous materials at unprecedented rates--but nobody wants to play garbage-collector.

The United States growing waste disposal problems have been brought to the public's attention in the last month by a series of incidents. First, Ray shut down the Hanford site, causing a slight panic among the nation's universities and hospitals which depend on radioactive maerials for their experiments. A couple of weeks later, Nevada Gov. Robert List shut down the second of the nation's three radioactive waste burial grounds at Beatty, Nev. "I'm just tired of having to assume the responsibility for having our people take the risks in a system which is not properly regulated," List said. Then last week, South Carolina Gov. Richard W. Riley cut in half the volume of wastes accepted by his state's Barnwell disposal facility, which handles 85 per cent of the nation's commercial radioactive sludge. It wasn't the first time that the three sites had been shut down, but when they all went at once, people began to worry.

JUST OUTSIDE WASHINGTON D.C. today, more than a month after Ray shut down the Hanford site, the three governors will sit down with NRC officials and talk about their problems. The issue, though not very attractive, seems fairly clear-cut. The nation is producting a lot of radioactive waste--ranging from the really dangerous stuff that reactors generate to laboratory brands no more radioactive than the human body--and there is no place to put it.

By the year 2040, a recently-released Department of Energy (DOE) study indicates, the United States will be sitting on 1.3 million 12-ft. by 8-in. cylinders of high-level waste, 1.7 million slightly larger containers of intermediate-level waste and 2 million 55-gallon drums of low-level waste. "Existing sites are going to fill up and the demand keeps increasing," warns Theodore Greenwood, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who served on a White House task force that examined the issued. In short, as Greenwood laments, "we badly need more sites."

The history of the federal government's attempts to solve the waste disposal problem is a textbook case in agency buck-passing. In late 1977, the NRC urged the DOE to prepare a contingency plan in case the country's three commercial disposal sites had to be shut down. The NRC identified a "Clear potential for disruption," and suggested--as Illinois Gov. James Thompson recommended last week--opening the government's 14 existing sites to commercial waste generators. Nothing was done.

In 1978, an inter-agency panel held a very long and very scary set of hearings which considered the radioactive waste disposal problem in some depth. When the panel finished its hearings, it unanimously recommended that the DOE set up regional low-level waste storage sites. The greatest problem, the panel found, is the risk taken when wastes are shipped clear across the country for burial. About eight months ago, the recommendation was sent to the White House for review. In keeping with a growing tradition, nothing has been done about the DOE study either--President Carter, his aides say, is still making up his mind.

Carter's hesitancy to recommend a course of action is not really surprising, however. After all, nobody wants to be the person to start the national battle over whose backyard should have which nuclear dump--especially in an election year. In the Northeast, which generates about 40 per cent of the nation's radioactive waste but has no disposal sites, state governments have followed the federal lead, skillfully avoiding the problem.

In Massachusetts, which a 1976 government study indicates is one of the 12 largest state producers of waste, the legislature is considering a bill to regulate hazardous waste disposal. But the legislature's session ended just this week--and it never brought up the problem. "Every state has dragged its heels and neglected its responsibilities," says one Harvard safety official. And the feds are trying to dump the problem on the states. Says Goetz Oertal, the DOE's director of waste products, "It's a choice each state is going to have to make."

THE PROBLEM, IN A WORK, is political. As usual, it's taken a crisis of sorts to prompt any action. With Three Mile Island fresh in their minds, people in the United States cringe at anything labelled 'nuclear' or 'radioactive.' "When you mention radioactivity," explains Dr. Warren E. C. Wacker, director of University Health Services, "everybody goes into orbit." As City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci's election eve hysteria in Cambridge indicates, waste disposal is a political hot potato. "Nuclear hysteria," volunteers Dr. Ralph R. DiSibio, Nevada director of human resources, "is spreading."

To curb that hysteria, and depoliticize the issue, the federal and state officials must draw up inform national regulations. The policy should include a plan for costly on-site waste incineration--a process which many feel may help solve transportation risks--and regional low-level dumping sites. Incoherent federal regulations governing transportation of hazardous materials must be tightened.

Most important, the government must vest in one agency the responsibility for waste disposal--which threatens to become a bigger problem when chemical waste policies are viewed this winter. Inconsistent policies and bureaucratic buckpassing has turned a misunderstood situation into a political debacle. As DiSibio says, "They better stop worrying about who's going to be elected in 1982 and start worrying about who's going to be alive."