Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, doesn't see the Yucca and Skull Valley plans as linked, says Matheson spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend. "Congressman Matheson has never supported either repository." His position is that if the dry cask storage technology proposed for the Goshute site is so wonderful, why not use it on site at the reactors themselves.

That, in fact, is what has begun happening. As pools for spent fuel fill up, utility companies are building giant concrete-and-steel casks near their reactors, designed to hold waste for many decades.

"The problem we now face is largely a product of industry's own making," says James Muckerheide, the state nuclear engineer in Massachusetts, who monitors federal safety regulation of reactors there. "If the industry simply shut up about Yucca Mountain, instead of dishonestly claiming that on-site spent fuel storage is an unacceptable hazard, the issue could have been largely defused," Muckerheide wrote in a recent e-mail message to colleagues.

The industry has long assumed that opening the waste repository would change the politics and make a new plant more palatable for communities. But lately they have raised the idea that new reactors, which may soon be financially practical, need not wait for the Yucca project to be completed.

"The problem of what to do with the waste is intractable," counters HEAL Utah's Ward. "There are no good solutions, so compounding an intractable problem is not smart, and that's essentially what they're doing" by proposing even more reactors.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has not given up on Yucca. "The need for Yucca Mountain still exists," says Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis. "The budget figure will show what we believe we can responsibly spend in moving the program forward, particularly in the areas of licensing and work on our (waste) transportation program."

Last year, the administration sought $880 million for the Yucca program and hoped to submit a formal license application for the facility to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December. Largely because of a budget error of the administration's own making, Congress provided only $577 million.

Incoming Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said recently he hoped the license application could be forwarded late this year.

"The important thing is we're moving ahead making progress on the mountain," said John Kane, senior vice president for congressional affairs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group. The project "traditionally has had ups and downs," Kane said, calling the latest developments no different.

Nevada officials have not given up their fight to block the project, hoping to show that the Energy Department has not shown that Yucca Mountain is the safest and best place to bury wastes that will remain highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

Opponents have also criticized the department for failing to develop a clear transportation plan for moving the 70,000 tons of used reactor fuel and defense waste.

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Contributing: Associated Press, New York Times News Service

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com