Hatch said his cooperation with the administration and reluctance to go against Yucca Mountain and align with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., allowed him to negotiate with the utilities. Hatch would not go into detail on who in the administration helped with the negotiations or what exactly was brought to the table. He said he brought up Bishop's position on the House Rules Committee, his future chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee and the litigation options the state still can put into play.

News of the financial changes came as a surprise to many on Thursday, but it was unclear why progress on Yucca Mountain seemed to be the main reason the companies changed. The project has its own set of problems, and Nevada is fighting Yucca as much as Utah is fighting PFS.

"Southern and Xcel have clearly seen the writing on the wall for interim storage in Utah, but they mistakenly continue to look to the unsafe and unsuitable site at Yucca Mountain to solve their waste problem," said Michele Boyd, legislative director at Public Citizen, a nonprofit that opposes the Yucca repository.

Meanwhile, Hatch and Bishop insisted that this blow to the PFS project will not cause them to back down at all from Bishop's attempt to create 100,000 acres of wilderness in Utah's western desert. The proposed wilderness designation would block PFS from building a railroad to move waste through Utah.

Bishop and Hatch expect a decision on the wilderness language today.

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Contributing: Lisa Riley Roche, Deborah Bulkeley

E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com