Asked if he was hopeful that the project will be built, he said it was like his father always said, "If it's going to come here, it's going to come here." The facility will be built on the reservation "if that's where it's intended to go," Bear said.

Margene Bullcreek, a member of the Skull Valley Band who lives on the reservation and who opposes the project, said she does not know the terms of the agreement with PFS.

She and other opponents have been saying "this contract is not valid because we don't know what's contained in there," she said in a telephone interview.

"Hopefully, it's not going to happen," she said of the project.

The project would store "more than half of the nation's (nuclear) waste on our small, little reservation, and there's no guarantee this is as safe as they say it is, because of the man-made accidents," she said. "Why should we give up our sovereignty, our indigenous land to store this waste?" Bullcreek asked. She worried that if some irreversible incident took place, "what's going to happen to us? Are we going to relocate?"

The $100 million cited, assuming it is a correct figure, is not the only amount to be paid to Utah entities. In September 2005, this newspaper quoted Martin as saying the utility consortium could pay Tooele County up to $250 million in lieu of property tax over the project's 40-year life.

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E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com; bau@desnews.com