The longer Yucca Mountain roams the land as the undead, the more attractive is the stop-gap plan to store some of the nastiest stuff on Earth on the Goshute Skull Valley reservation 50 miles from Salt Lake City.

If, that is, you can call a facility that might last 100 years a stop-gap.

Utah officials have been largely supportive of Yucca Mountain, the plan to permanently store radioactive waste in an underground facility near Las Vegas. With that project either in business or very nearly so, there would be less pressure to bring the waste to Utah, for now or forever.

But if Yucca remains just over the horizon, with neither an operating license nor a stake through its heart, storage in Utah becomes more likely, not less. If Yucca Mountain truly dies, so, probably, will the Goshute plan.

Nevada politicians, armed with the clout that comes with representing a political swing state, want Yucca Mountain abandoned. Instead, they reasonably say, we should find a de-centralized solution, maybe long-term storage on the site of each waste generator, until a proper final resolution is found.

But the nuclear industry wants the waste removed from sites in 39 states ASAP. It's not only to pass off the cost of storage, but also to make any future nuclear power plants less distasteful to communities, communities that might balk if they knew that permanent on-site storage were part of the deal.

The latest, perhaps fatal, blow to Yucca Mountain was a July appeals court finding that the government was not following its own rules for the proposed final resting place for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.

Congress had ordered that a 1995 National Academy of Sciences study be written into Yucca's rules. The Environmental Protection Agency said it had done so, finding that the facility could safely contain radioactivity for the next 10,000 years.

But the court read the NAS report to mean that the facility must be up to containing radiation for upwards of 300,000 years. That's widely thought to be a standard Yucca Mountain can't meet.

EPA boss Mike Leavitt is considering asking Congress for a more attainable target. Congressional willingness to keep the project alive is waning, though, and the current administration has too little credibility when it comes to making policy based on accurate science.

The good news is that now, rather than being pitted against one another, Utah and Nevada can work together to end the gridlock and send the whole thing back to the drawing board.