Once that is done, the public will have its first look - albeit censored - at the fine print regarding how PFS plans to pay for construction and operation of the $3.1 billion facility planned for the Skull Valley Goshute reservation 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

The NRC order covers five of the hundreds of documents presented to the Atomic Safety Licensing Board during the seven years PFS has been seeking a license.

PFS attorney Jay Silberg said PFS has 60 days to send the redacted documents to the licensing board. The order itself also is considered proprietary and must be redacted and sent back to the NRC within 30 days, he said. After the agencies review them, the marked-up documents will be released to the public.

The licensing board is expected next month to issue its opinion on whether the NRC should grant PFS a 20-year license, renewable for an additional 20 years.

PFS would be the nation's first private off-site temporary nuclear waste storage facility, available to utilities as an interim option while waiting to send spent fuel rods to Yucca Mountain, Nev., where a permanent repository was scheduled to open in 1998.

Financial and legal problems have pushed that opening date to 2015 or beyond.

PFS would ship to Utah by rail up to 4,000 concrete and steel casks, each welded shut and weighing more than 170 tons. PFS says the utilities sending the waste would continue to own it until it could be sent on to Yucca Mountain.

The consortium has closely guarded its financial information, claiming potential business competition.

The state of Utah opposes the facility, fearing the waste could be abandoned in Skull Valley, and has demanded that PFS explain how it would cover the costs of shipping the casks back to the utilities.

That possibility has become more of an issue since October, when a key Energy Department official said the agency's contract with the nuclear utilities could prohibit it from taking the casks directly from PFS to Yucca Mountain.