WASHINGTON — While talk of building new nuclear power plants has only started in Utah, companies in other states have actually filed license applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for new plants.

But as the industry prepares for what it hopes is a long-awaited "nuclear renaissance," the battle over what to do with nuclear waste lingers.

In 1998, the federal government was scheduled to take the used nuclear fuel from reactors and move it to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Now, almost a decade later, the Energy Department says the "best-achievable schedule" to open the site is in 2017.

While work on Yucca continues, the Energy Department is also working on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, known as GNEP, part of which involves research into reprocessing or recycling spent nuclear fuel to be used again in reactors but without generating dangerous nuclear by-products.

"GNEP is completely compatible with our near-term effort to license and open the waste repository at Yucca Mountain," Dennis Spurgeon, assistant secretary of Nuclear Energy told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday.

But Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the committee's top Republican, said the government needs to do something sooner rather than later. He pointed out that the government has estimated it will owe $7 billion to nuclear companies for failing to take the waste if Yucca opens in 2017 and $11 billion if it opens in 2020, or about $1.3 billion a year.

"We must have a path forward, not 50 years from now, but now," Domenici said. "We are left with only one choice — focus on an integrated spent fuel strategy that will address our liability question immediately, and implement a recycling strategy that will avoid the political and economic nightmare that would result from attempts to site a second repository."

In addition to moving the government to talks on reprocessing, the delay in opening Yucca Mountain forced Utah to fight its own battle over nuclear waste with the planned temporary storage site at the Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County. Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of companies looking for a place to store waste until Yucca opens, got a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for temporary storage on the Goshute reservation. But more than a year ago, the government voided the lease and did not give a right of way to land needed for a transportation hub, stopping the project.

While the PFS project is on hold, unless a court would rule otherwise, Nevada still is fighting the Yucca project.