"It's ill-advised," Huntsman said Thursday. "It would be nice to be able to speak with some sense of unanimity as a state and a delegation, as I believe Nevada is doing, on something as important as this."

Through a spokesman, Hatch declined to respond to the governor's criticism Thursday.

Huntsman commented about his fellow Republican a day after Hatch reiterated his support for the White House's nuclear waste strategy.

The senator insisted that working with the Bush administration is the only way to scuttle plans to store nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Utah, and that it hurts the state's cause to "kick them in the teeth."

The governor sees it differently.

"I do believe that as we come together with one voice and one mind that there are some things legislatively that we can accomplish with the help of our friends in Nevada," Huntsman said Thursday in his monthly KUED news conference. "That's only possible if we come together in a unified way. And that's something that I have encouraged, and I will continue to encourage."

Utah's senior senator clings to his view, despite it conflicting with the rest of Utah's congressional delegation, including Sen. Bob Bennett, who publicly renounced his earlier support for Yucca Mountain, saying it is clear the waste dump will never be built.

Instead, Bennett and other members of Utah's delegation have embraced a proposal by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid to store the reactor waste at the power plants that produced it and find ways to reprocess and reuse the material.

Such an approach would make it unnecessary to ship the waste to either Yucca Mountain or the Skull Valley site, where a group of electric utilities known as Private Fuel Storage proposes storing 44,000 tons of waste above ground in steel casks.

Hatch has drafted a bill that would impose a moratorium on shipping waste to a private storage site such as Skull Valley. Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has not introduced any legislation to make his plan a reality, although Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., is sponsoring such a bill in the House.

"After eight years of trying it his way, it's time for Hatch to join Team Utah," said Vanessa Pierce of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. "He should know we're stronger united than we are divided."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a license for the PFS facility, although other obstacles remain, including winning Interior Department approval of the lease with the Skull Valley tribe and a right-of-way for a rail line to ship waste to the site.