"The thing is, they are supposed to be protecting us, to help us," said Bear. "When is that help going to come?"

The 123-member Tooele County tribe had fought the Utah state government, its congressional delegation and public opinion for a decade when two federal decisions last Thursday appeared to kill the multibillion-dollar project just months after it received a federal nuclear license.

The Interior Department blocked transportation of waste to the site and invalidated the previously approved lease between the tribe and its utility-company partners. In effect, the agency ruined the tribe's effort to make money on their 18,500-acre reservation in a desert state where casinos are banned and where the federal government had pushed for nuclear waste sites.

"If they want to run the reservation, why don't they just come out and run it?" asked Bear, noting that the Goshutes and partner Private Fuel Storage have not decided yet if they will fight the rulings.

Should PFS opt to fight the ruling, the Goshutes "will stand by it, I believe," said the tribal chairman in his most extensive interview since last week's decision.

In comments to national and international news organizations over the past week, Bear has talked about the nation's history of erratic sovereign-to-sovereign relations with Indian tribes. The federal government had promoted such ventures as part of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and tribal members had voted for the project, he noted.

As planned, the waste site would have provided an open-air storage pad for used reactor waste, dangerously radioactive material that would be stored in steel and concrete containers on 100 acres across the road from the tribal village. Up to 44,000 tons of waste could be stored there for up to 40 years under the tribe's contract with PFS.

Bear said Interior Department officials, who by law are supposed to look out for the Goshutes' interests, had not spoken with the tribe since issuing their ruling last week.

"They haven't sent me the decision yet - unless they had it sent by pony express," he said.

Interior Department spokeswoman Maria Streshinsky said the tribe and PFS have the option of appealing the rulings to the U.S. District Court. She indicated that after Interior officials made their final decision, they called Bear and left a message on his cell phone.

"The first call the department always makes is to the tribe," she said.

While project opponents wait to learn the tribe and the consortium's next move, there continues to be speculation about whether there is enough support among utilities behind the project to fight the rulings.

Minnesota-based Xcel Energy, which has spent about $23 million on the Skull Valley project, has indicated it will not fund any further review or appeal. Its chief executive officer sent a letter to U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, last winter pledging not to support the Skull Valley site as long as a national solution, such as the Yucca Mountain, Nev., repository, is moving forward.

Bear saved his harshest words for Hatch, who served for years on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and last week "boasted" about engineering the Skull Valley project's demise, telling reporters, "it couldn't happen to nicer people."

"It saddens me for one of our politicians to take a stand like that and not offer any other kind of alternative," Bear said.

"This is the Goshute people out here - look at history," he said. "Look at how Hitler treated the Jews. I'm not saying it's that, but he's putting himself against the people here."

Bear called several parts of the ruling "thin." He noted, for instance, the Utah-based superintendent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs signed off on the PFS-Goshute lease in 1997 but, on Thursday, said the signature was improper.

"That led us to believe that, once the conditions were met [for legal, safety and environmental review] that they [at BIA] would sign it."

Bear had led his tribe through a 17-year review process, that was initially funded by Congress in an attempt to find communities and tribes willing to accept nuclear waste. San Juan County in southeastern Utah looked into the program as an economic opportunity, and the Goshutes actually pursued it.

The Goshute leader also noted that the tiny tribe has spent lots of its own money on the project while state leaders pumped millions of dollars into stopping it.

"They were against us," he said, "Yet, they could put all of those waste dumps out here in the West Desert."

In the desert surrounding the Goshute reservation there is a chemical weapons destruction plant, a chemical and biological weapons test site, a hazardous waste incinerator and a low-level radioactive waste landfill.

"This [nuclear waste site] is something we reached out for, and we almost got it."

fahys@sltrib.com