"Their read on this certainly doesn't square with ours," he said. "I don't see how PFS will find a way to do this, with no railroad, new wilderness, and no new partners. What company in its right mind would see this as a sound business opportunity to partner with PFS?"

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who introduced the bill creating the wilderness area, said the act would "block the northern rail spur that PFS would need to the waste" and that this represents a major setback to the project.

"I'm glad we've been able to put up some serious roadblocks to this ill-advised proposal," he said. "And we will continue the fight.

"The chairman of PFS may be able to explain why this foolish project would be good for him and the out-of-state utilities, but he is unable to explain how on earth it would make sense to put an above-ground high-level nuclear waste storage facility right next to a bombing range. No one can, because it doesn't make sense."

Meanwhile, Lee explained that the petition Utah filed with the appeals court is the second in several months. The first was in November, before the NRC issued the license.

"This is another filing in basically the same action we brought" before the license was issued, he said. "We just filed this one out of an abundance of caution, to make sure we had taken account of subsequent rulings."

The state was being careful to "avoid any question of possible procedural default," he added. So, the petition now cites the granting of the license and other rulings that took place since the original petition.

Some key arguments in the state's petition include:

• The NRC should not have granted approval of a storage facility for highly radioactive waste in a route overflown thousands of times a year by military aircraft en route to the Utah Test and Training Range — some of which "carry live ordnance." The concern is that a plane might crash or a bomb might fall onto the storage facility.

• The NRC approved the plant as a temporary storage site, even though it would use protective casks that are not the same as those that would be brought to the government's planned permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

When will the appeals court rule on Utah's petition?

"I would imagine it would be at least six to eight months before we have any kind of decision," Lee said. "It could be a year or so."

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Contributing: Leigh Dethman.

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