The Atomic Safety Licensing Board hasn't signaled to its parent body, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, what it will do; in fact, it has taken far longer to make a decision on the application - more than seven years - than anyone expected.
But even if the NRC approves the license, there remains a significant and costly logistical problem: PFS must haul the 720-ton containers of spent nuclear fuel across 32 miles of desert between the Union Pacific rail line and the 820-acre parcel the Skull Valley Goshute tribe has leased to the consortium.
It's here the project could lose traction, caught in a military-political-wilderness dragnet cast five years ago in Congress by former 1st Congressional District Rep. Jim Hansen and pulled in by his successor, Rep. Rob Bishop.
To get the 4,000 containers to the storage facility, designed to be an interim stop for the waste on the way to a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., PFS will either build a rail spur or rebuild the two-lane state highway that cuts through the reservation from an Interstate 80 off-ramp. The rail option is PFS' preferred alternative.
Right now, both options look like roads to nowhere, detoured inadvertently but indefinitely by a moratorium on wilderness studies on the Utah Test and Training Range, the largest such Defense Department range in the nation.
That's because the moratorium prevents the Bureau of Land Management from approving the necessary right-of-way for the rail spur. Without that BLM approval, the rail spur can't be built.
PFS lawyer Jay Silberg said Friday that the facility construction doesn't necessarily have to wait for the rail spur.
"Right now, it's not affecting us. It has not held up anything," he said.
Spokeswoman Sue Martin said PFS can't start construction until it has service agreements with consortium members and other customers. She declined to comment on how the rail spur hang-up might affect the facility's plans.
But Bishop sees it as a major impediment, aides said. And he plans to exploit it until he finds another way to stop the project.
"It's one of the many arrows in our quiver," said Steve Petersen, Bishop's senior policy adviser and counsel.
The moratorium started after then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's inventory of potential wilderness study areas included land near the Hill Air Force training range. Completing the wilderness study area process would have required the BLM to amend its land-use plan for the region.
Seeking to halt the process, Hansen inserted a provision in the 2000 National Defense Authorization Act that first required the Air Force to assess how wilderness study might affect the training range. Until then, no changes to the land-use plan are allowed.
The Air Force never has gotten from Congress the money it says it needs for the study. And if Bishop has his way, it won't, said Petersen, formerly an aide to Hansen.
It might seem a contradictory position for the Republican congressman, who recently backed a bipartisan bill that sought to create a wilderness area on BLM property next to the test range. The proposal would have allowed fighter jet overflights but blocked rail shipments of waste to the Goshute facility.
The bill died in the Senate in December, the victim, Bishop says, of Nevada senators still angry over Utah senators' votes in favor of the Yucca Mountain project. Bishop has said he will reintroduce the legislation in the next Congress.
Meanwhile, the moratorium is the next best thing, Petersen said.
Bishop "is going to throw everything at it that is legally and ethically permissible to block PFS," which is "right in the driveway of the Utah Test and Training Range," Petersen said. "If nuclear waste goes in there, a third of the usable range is toast. . . . To some degree, [the Air Force] is taken out of this whole debate because of high-level nuclear politics."
While those who oppose the PFS proposal - including Utah's congressional delegation, the state Legislature and governor and an overwhelming number of Utah residents - may cheer anything that thwarts the PFS plan, there is collateral damage.
The moratorium has been interpreted to prevent any land-use changes on more than 5 million acres in Box Elder, Tooele and Juab counties, said Don Banks, spokesman for the BLM Salt Lake City office.
The agency's inability to approve rights-of-way also has blocked other project proposals, including fiber optics, wind energy, sagebrush restoration, bighorn sheep introduction, off-highway vehicle recreation and livestock grazing.
"This is having major adverse impacts on our ability to do business," Banks said. "It's not only stopped us from moving forward, taking actions. In many instances it's been the catalyst for litigation."
Dianne Nielson, executive director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, noted PFS can choose the alternate route of trucking the waste casks.
But that would require a wholesale overhaul of the state highway that connects I-80 with the reservation and building some kind of transfer point near the rail line, where the spent nuclear fuel containers would be lifted onto heavy-haul trucks. Because the I-80 overpass isn't high enough to allow the trucks to pass, that would have to be rebuilt, too.
Then, PFS would have to apply to the state for a permit to run the trucks on the highway.
"If they met the requirements of the law, we would eventually have to issue them a permit," Nielson said.
Silberg, the PFS attorney, said he didn't foresee PFS applying any pressure on the Air Force to get their study done so the moratorium can be lifted and the rail right-of-way approved.
"We assume that if the Air Force has been told to do a study, they will do a study," he said.
