Conflicting Orders Delay Soil Cleanup at Rockwell Lab : Environment: The company says the state ordered that the material be removed, but doing so would violate federal rules controlling ‘mixed’ wastes.

Conflicting orders from state and federal agencies are delaying cleanup of contaminated soil from a former toxic and radioactive waste dump at Rockwell International’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth.

In what Rockwell officials described Thursday as a “Catch-22 situation,” the company is delaying the soil removal required by state officials because the cleanup would violate federal rules controlling “mixed” wastes--those containing hazardous and radioactive compounds.

“Everyone agrees that the best thing is to clean it up, but the regulations prevent it,” said Jerry Gaylord, program manager for environmental restoration at the Santa Susana lab, operated by Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division.

“It becomes somewhat frustrating,” he said.

However, an official with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency that ordered the cleanup, said he believed the conflict will be resolved in time for Rockwell to meet a Dec. 31 cleanup deadline.

The unusual situation involves a two-acre disposal area known as the Sodium Burn Pit, where Rockwell formerly burned and buried wastes from nuclear energy research. Part of the burn pit soil is laced with low-level radioactive material and elsewhere it contains toxic chemicals or heavy metals.

The problem involves a small area of the pit that contains both.

Due to a lack of sites to treat or dispose them, federal officials banned generation of mixed wastes effective May 8. Since digging up the pit could be considered generating mixed wastes, Rockwell for now is stuck between the rock of the water board order and the hard place of federal rules.

In an effort to resolve the problem, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials told Rockwell in a letter June 10 that they would be inclined to look the other way if the company digs up and stores the mixed wastes until a disposal site becomes available.

Cleaning up “the Old Sodium Burn Pit . . . is an important and environmentally beneficial action,” Jeffrey Zelikson, director of hazardous waste management for the EPA’s San Francisco regional office, said in the letter last month.

The agency, he said, would place a “low priority” on enforcing the letter of the law if Rockwell removes and safely stores the mixed waste.

But Gaylord said Rockwell has no interest in the offer. The EPA is saying “that we would be violating a federal law,” Gaylord said. “It leaves the company too vulnerable.”

Gaylord said state and federal officials and Rockwell representatives have held two meetings to try to resolve the conflict, and will probably meet again next week.

In the meantime, cleanup is under way in other parts of the burn pit. Of about 4,000 cubic yards of earth to be removed, only about 300 cubic yards--roughly 20 dump truck loads--are mixed waste, Gaylord said.

Of the contaminated soil that is unmixed, the radioactive waste will be disposed of at the federal nuclear reservation in Hanford, Wash. The hazardous waste will be hauled to a commercial toxic waste dump, Gaylord said.

Dennis Dasker, a supervising engineer with the water quality board, said he believed the mixed wastes would have been removed before May 8 had it not been for the winter rains.

In any case, he said, the end-of-year deadline is not yet in serious jeopardy. He said it should take about two months to remove the mixed wastes, and a solution can probably be found in time.

The $5-million burn pit project is part of a $44-million, federally funded cleanup of contaminated soil and buildings in a 290-acre area of the field lab where Rockwell for three decades performed nuclear work for the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.