Unless there is some evidence that the material could be transferred to Nevada, "the whole idea of this being an interim storage site is a farce, is a ruse," Lee said.

Arguments decided in the latest appeal were largely technical, involving questions such as whether a glancing blow at the top of a cask from a crashing F-16 could smash with sufficient force into an adjacent cask to cause damage to its side. The board said it could not.

Another issue was whether enough F-16 crashes had been analyzed to calculate the likelihood of such an accident at the site. The board said there's no reason to think recalculating such factors would change the remote likelihood of such an accident.

Lee said the NRC licensing board is not the end of the line for Utah's opposition. "We're fighting this battle on various fronts." These include:

• Appealing to the whole NRC. "We've got 15 days to file a petition for review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commis- sion," Lee said.

• Opposing the plant siting before the Bureau of Indian Affairs. BIA approval is needed before any such action can take place on an Indian reservation.

• Asking the Bureau of Land Management not to authorize the railroad spur across BLM land that would be required to haul casks from the Union Pacific main line to Skull Valley.

The state also is appealing federal court rulings against a Utah law that would have given state regulators more authority over PFS. A petition is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, which may decide whether to accept the challenge by the end of next month.

"We're going to fight this at every step," Lee said.

Bishop said the licensing board and the NRC deal with technical issues, not policy issues. An example of a policy issue is that "it is not very smart to build a nuclear waste dump next to a bombing range," he said.

"What we are talking about is airspace, and by definition the NRC doesn't deal with that."

Bishop does not have much hope that the NRC will listen to Lam.

"If the NRC was going to make the right policy decision, it would have done it already. If they surprise me, I will be happy. But I am not counting on them to be part of our strategy" to block PFS, Bishop said.

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Contributing: Jerry Spangler

E-mail: bau@desnews.com