They were also moved to offer Utahns hope that such a process, belonging to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would provide to state officials and residents “fair and full consideration” of their concerns.

This is the same NRC that has just announced that, in the name of preventing terrorism, it will force the nation to take the nuclear industry's word for the security of its facilities.

The same NRC that has scheduled three weeks of closed-door meetings to consider the plan to store up to 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in Tooele County.

“Full and fair consideration” in secret? There's no such animal.

The Goshutes have offered some of their territory to an outfit called Private Fuel Storage as a place to “temporarily” park the detritus of the nuclear power industry while everybody waits four decades or more for a permanent storage facility to open.

Utah, rightly, passed laws to effectively prevent that plan from going forward. The Goshutes and PFS protested in the federal courts, arguing that Congress has decided that the licensing and regulation of such storage facilities was strictly a federal matter.

First a federal district judge, and now a three-judge appeals panel, agreed with the Goshutes. And such a reading of the law has, in theory, a sound basis.

Finding the best possible way - or the least awful way - of dealing with the waste materials from nuclear reactors is a problem that is national in scope and complex in fact. But the political and scientific superiority we've been promised from the feds has, so far, proved lacking.

All the secrecy the NRC seems comfortable with these days is less a matter of protecting the public from terror than of protecting the industry and its regulators from the public eye. The key flaw in the Goshute plan - above-ground storage - is no secret. Neither are the locations of all our nuclear power plants.

A more detailed accounting of security flaws should be available to concerned citizens and independent experts, so they can do their duty as citizens, but would be mere trivia to the sorts of people who crash airplanes into buildings.

Or nuclear waste dumps.

Utah officials say they will continue to oppose the Goshute plan wherever they can, as they should. But it will be hard for the rest of us to help, or even observe, unless the federal government, led by Congress, takes a less secretive attitude.