The Skull Valley Band of Goshutes asked a federal judge Monday to throw out two U.S. Interior Department rulings that killed their proposal to use their Tooele County reservation as a parking lot for high-level nuclear waste.

U.S. District Judge David M. Ebell is expected to decide in coming months whether Interior Department officials violated their own requirements when, in September 2006, they issued one ruling rejecting a right-of-way request and a lease agreement for the temporary storage site.

"These decisions don't hold water at all," said Tim Vollmann, an attorney representing the tiny Utah tribe.

The 2007 case is the tribe's last-ditch effort to revive its plan for a storage site that the nation's commercial nuclear power plants would use for temporary storage of up to 44,000 tons of reactor waste until a permanent disposal site is available.

The tribe worked for more than a decade with a consortium of nuclear utility companies called Private Fuel Storage LLC and received a license for the facility from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005. It was the first license for a new, high-level nuclear facility in more than three decades.

A year later, when U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch announced the Interior Department rulings, the Utah Republican said, "We just wanted to put a spike right through the heart of this project, and this [agency action] does it."

Hatch, the four other members of Utah's congressional delegation and the state of Utah -- backed by an overwhelming majority of Utah residents -- had all lobbied the agency for help stopping the project.

On Monday, neither Vollman nor the Interior Department's attorneys discussed the highly charged political environment surrounding the right-of-way and lease decisions. Instead, they talked about the obligation of federal administrators to follow proper procedures.

Vollman said James E. Cason, associate deputy Interior secretary, and Chad Calvert, principal deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management, had made many errors when they rejected the Goshutes' requests.

In effect, he alleged they had failed to work with the tribe in good faith to address shortcomings in the lease and the right-of-way that later became the grounds for their negative rulings. In addition, Vollmann said, Cason, in overseeing Indian affairs, was required to be deferential to the Goshutes' wishes for how they chose to use their land.

"The tribe asked many times, 'What are your concerns?' " Vollman told Ebell, a visiting judge hearing the case. "The tribe was never told [about possible problems with the lease...They were led to believe there was no problem."

U.S. Justice Department lawyer Kristofor R. Swanson, however, asserted that agency officials do not have that obligation. "There is no affirmative obligation" for the administrator to help create a successful application, said Swanson.