Eight years was just too long to wait.

Since coming together in 1997 to form the Private Fuel Storage consortium to push for construction of a spent nuclear fuel storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation, at least six of the eight original PFS members pursued their own storage options.

"The possibility is pretty remote for at least the foreseeable future that we'll end up sending anything to Utah," said Ray Golden, spokesman for Southern California Edison's San Onofre nuclear power plant. "At the time we joined PFS we didn't have licenses for on-site storage [of spent fuel] but now we do."

Five other members, including Xcel Energy of Minnesota, one of the driving forces behind the consortium, agreed.

"We'll have plenty of our own on-site storage," said Charles Bomberger, general manager of nuclear asset management at Xcel. He noted that since PFS was organized Xcel has expanded the storage capacity at one of its two nuclear power plants and now is in the process of expanding the other.

PFS chief John Parkyn, who hailed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Friday decision to issue PFS a license to build and operate, is unfazed by his members' plans to handle their spent fuel on-site rather than send it to Utah for storage.

Nuclear power plants were never envisioned or designed to be long-term storage sites, Parkyn said. "Now that we're licensed and will soon have the capacity to put [spent] fuel in one place, I suspect that every company in the country will seriously consider using our facility," he said.

American Electric Power may be the first consortium member in line. Spokesman Bill Schalk said the reactor has enough storage capacity at its Bridgeman, Mich., plant for at least the next six years. "But after 2011 we're going to need a place," he said. "At that time the Utah facility could be a viable option for us."

Whether it's feasible for anyone else is a question mark, said Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group. "I don't know on the economics, who it's going to be good for, who it's not," he said.

Attitudes about interim storage at nuclear reactors and reprocessing are evolving with more utilities willing to store the material themselves. Meanwhile, calls for federal interim storage continue, including a spending bill proposal from Ohio Rep. David Hobson, who wants DOE to take possession of spent waste and store it until reprocessing technologies mature.

The Senate, led by Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, has rejected that proposal. But Hobson will continue to push it in the House, said spokeswoman Sara Perkins.

Parkyn is manager for nuclear and special projects for Dairyland Power Cooperative in La Crosse, Wis., which owns the shuttered La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor just downstream from the Mississippi River village of Genoa. He would like to move the reactor's 41 tons of spent fuel to Utah.

Parkyn has had to plead his case before a host of public officials, including skeptical members of the Western Governors' Association, who oppose siting any nuclear facility without express consent of governors.

At a recent appearance before the California Energy Commission, Parkyn said waste from decommissioned plants could not be returned if a planned permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., fails to open.

PFS projects the life of the Skull Valley facility at 40 years. However, Parkyn told the California Energy Commission, if the PFS license is not renewed, "the most likely scenario would be that it would be assigned to someone else."

That kind of talk worries some observers, who see PFS becoming a convenient substitute should Yucca collapse - a very real possibility.

"Fortunately or unfortunately for Utah, this has a lot to do with the future of Yucca Mountain," said Bob Halstead, a consultant to the state of Nevada in its fight to stop Yucca. "The future of Yucca Mountain does not look very bright right now. Will PFS somehow be able to capitalize on the delay or failure of Yucca Mountain?"

Even if Yucca opens by its new expected completion date of 2015 - a big if, considering the Energy Department hasn't even filed an application for a license amid multiplying political problems - the DOE has stated flatly it won't accept the welded-shut waste containers PFS will store.

David Zabransky of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, speaking in May in Salt Lake City to representatives of the Western Governors' Association, said DOE rules on accepting waste from nuclear reactors have been known since the late 1980s. Those rules require that it be "bare fuel," that is, packed to DOE specifications directly from reactors' cooling pools.

DOE's position only adds to concerns that once the waste is here, it won't leave.

Jason Groenewold, director of the anti-nuclear citizens group Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, fears PFS could be a hazardous-waste business incubator, especially as spent fuel reprocessing becomes more economically and politically viable.

"You're hearing [Gov. Jon] Huntsman call for reprocessing, you hear [Sens. Bob] Bennett and [Orrin] Hatch call for reprocessing. That to me is the worst-case scenario," Groenewold said.

New enterprises could include expanded waste hauling business, expansion of Envirocare's low-level waste facility or even reprocessing at Dugway Proving Ground or Deseret Chemical Depot, which may be looking for new missions, he said. "If we're not careful, we're going to be the magnet for all nuclear waste and every harebrained idea related to it."