"We'd like to move the fuel once to where it's going to stay," Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) Vice President John Kane said Wednesday when asked whether nuclear power plant owners and operators support Private Fuel Storage's proposal to build an interim storage site on the Skull Valley Reservation of the Goshute Indian Tribe.

"We're not taking any of these options off the table, [but] our goal, clearly, is to get Yucca in operation," Kane told reporters during a briefing on nuclear issues in the next Congress.

A consortium of eight utilities, several of which are members of the NEI, has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the Utah facility to hold casks of waste from Eastern reactors for up to 40 years. Once Yucca begins accepting waste, the plan calls for casks held at the Utah dump to be transported to Nevada.

The NEI's reluctance to back the PFS temporary storage proposal reflects the industry's political strategy to fight one battle at a time. And the priority for nuclear power plant operators is to get the delayed Yucca Mountain project into the federal licensing process next year.

"You want to keep moving on Yucca Mountain," said Marvin Fertel, NEI's chief nuclear officer. "If Yucca's found not to be acceptable, then you've got to do another site, but so far it has passed all the site suitability reviews and it ought to enter the licensing process."

On power plant operators' interest in locating old fuel rods now stored on-site to a temporary holding pen, Fertel said: "There's a belief in our industry that you don't handle spent fuel more often than you need to."

PFS spokesperson Sue Martin said the company shares that belief and strongly supports completion of Yucca Mountain, but must face political reality.

"The fact of the matter is Yucca Mountain is later and it's likely to be later, and our member utilities can't continue to wait," she said. "We're just as driven as everybody else in the industry to make sure Yucca Mountain gets done, because that's what all of the PFS member utility ratepayers have been paying for."

Because the PFS proposal to federal regulators would only allow a maximum of 40,000 tons to be stored above-ground for up to four decades, NEI officials said it would not be a viable alternative to the permanent underground repository at Yucca Mountain should the Nevada project fail to open. Its original completion target was 1998, but that has now been pushed back to at least 2010.

The discussion came the same day a national bipartisan commission on energy policy recommended that Congress and the Bush administration "move expeditiously to establish a project for centralized, interim, engineered storage of spent fuel at no fewer than two U.S. locations, as a complement and interim back-up" to Yucca Mountain.