May 4--A top Energy Department official on Tuesday said that any waste shipped to a high-level nuclear-waste facility planned for the Skull Valley Goshute reservation would not be accepted at the Yucca Mountain, Nev., federal waste repository.

David Zabransky of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, speaking in Salt Lake City to representatives of the Western Interstate Energy Board, said federal contract requirements forbid acceptance of spent nuclear fuel welded into any type of canister.

That would include the 44,000 tons of waste that Private Fuel Storage proposes to transport to Utah, he said.

Zabransky also said that the conditions aren't new. In fact, DOE rules on accepting waste from nuclear reactors -- that it be "bare fuel," that is, packed directly from reactors' cooling pools -- have been known since the late 1980s.

Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said after Zabransky's presentation that the Energy Department and the NRC, by not dealing with what has turned out to be a long-standing interpretation of what is known as the Standard Contract, have abdicated responsibility for PFS and whether it would indeed be a temporary facility.

"It isn't that they didn't plan for it," she said. "They've chosen to ignore it."

In October, when DOE waste transportation planner Gary Lanthrum said the PFS fuel might not be acceptable at the federal repository 90 miles north of Las Vegas, the interpretation seemed novel.

Surprised Utah officials made the revelation the centerpiece of an appeal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing board. They said it seemed to contradict PFS assertions that their $3.1 billion facility 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City would only be a Yucca Mountain way station.

But the board has refused to consider the argument, and is expected to rule any day on whether to give its final approval to PFS's license application, Nielson said.

The DOE's position on the welded casks -- such treatment means they cannot be inspected -- gives weight to Utah's fears that PFS will become a substitute for Yucca Mountain, which has been beset by delays, lawsuits and recent disclosures that a government scientist falsified data to support the project. Yucca Mountain was supposed to open in 1998, then in 2010, but now probably won't open until 2015, if ever.

"It's difficult under any scenario to understand how the NRC can license PFS as a temporary facility," Nielson said. "I don't mean to sound doomsday. To me this means this stays on the list [of what] has to be addressed."

Zabransky said it would be technically possible to set up a facility at Yucca where the PFS canisters, or similar canisters from any nuclear utility that stores spent fuel rods in casks once their cooling pools are full, could be cut open and repackaged. But that would be a "burden to the system," he said.

It also would be possible to renegotiate the contract, he said.

But that would mean the utilities might have to make concessions unfavorable to their interests, which he indicated would be unlikely.

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