Parkyn believes other utilities will join the PFS consortium to save money and that ultimately the federal government will come on board as well.

In some cases, it would cost utilities more to keep storing waste at their plant sites — especially at nuclear power plants no longer in use — than it would to move it to Utah, Parkyn said. Although he would not disclose specific amount, he said PFS is a more cost-effective option because there is one set of security, insurance and other costs split a number of ways versus one utility having to pay for its own on site storage itself.

Companies interested in using PFS to store waste would pay a per-cask-cost, a percentage based on how much waste they would have to store there. Parkyn agreed that there are still some obstacles for the project to overcome, but individual utilities face their own sets of problems having to store waste at their plant sites, so PFS is still a viable option. He said 72 plant sites have separate costs that can be consolidated into a small share of one site.

"It's an individual choice," Parkyn said of the utilities.

The proposed PFS site in Utah would be an interim storage location. It was conceived because the Energy Department has yet to open the permanent government-owned nu- clear waste site planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That site is plagued by its own set of delays and controversies. Federal law prohibits storing waste in Nevada before Yucca gets a license, and a federally owned interim waste site would need to be approved by Congress.

Parkyn said "nothing official" has taken place with the Energy Department on getting PFS to become a federal interim site, but it is "logical to not replicate it." It took PFS almost nine years to get a license, so PFS believes the government could use its site instead of creating its own.

"They (the Energy Department) know that we are here, and a lot of us have worked hard on this," Parkyn said.

'Toxic opportunity'

Meanwhile, the Time magazine article, "Utah's Toxic Opportunity" by reporter Margaret Roosevelt, has prompted discussion about how much the Goshutes in Tooele County could benefit from the project.

Jason Groenewold, director of the anti-nuclear group Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said the $100 million figure is "pennies on the dollar, compared to liabilities the nuclear industry faces for keeping this waste where it's generated. . . .

"Given that the liabilities and risks are going to be the highest for those that live in Skull Valley, they got the short end of the stick."