By PAUL FOY Associated Press writer

SALT LAKE CITY - The Bureau of Land Management is refusing to give its approval for a rail spur to a proposed nuclear waste storage site in Utah's west desert.

The utilities backing the project say they might resort to trucking the waste on a state highway, but the BLM official in charge said his agency had the power to veto that, too.

"We're not able to bring anything to conclusion on their behalf," Glenn A. Carpenter, field manager for the bureau's Salt Lake district, told The Associated Press Tuesday.

The BLM's refusal is one of a series of bureaucratic obstacles erected by the state's congressional delegation to stop Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of out-of-state utilities that won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September to build the way-station for nuclear waste.

The Skull Valley band of Goshute Indians signed a lucrative contract to take the radioactive waste from other states' nuclear-powered utilities.

The utilities call it a temporary solution pending a resolution of the troubled federal project at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but Utah politicians fear it will become a permanent repository.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the BLM's refusal to cooperate is a sign that the Bush administration is "on our side." In a statement issued Tuesday, Hatch said the agency has "jammed" the license authorized but not yet issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel would be stored about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

"This is one of many administrative and legal hurdles we are raising that PFS has to clear for Skull Valley to ever become a reality," Hatch said.

Carpenter said the BLM cannot authorize the construction of a Skull Valley rail line over government land because of restrictions Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, wrote into a 2000 defense appropriations bill.

Hansen's provision blocked the bureau from changing a land-use plan to grant a right of way across government land for the rail line. The BLM can't act until the Pentagon studies how proposed wilderness areas for Utah's west desert might affect operations at the Utah Test and Training Range. The Pentagon is nowhere near starting the study.

John Parkyn, Private Fuel Storage chairman and chief executive, has said he may be able to get around the problem by shipping the waste by truck, but Carpenter said that was no certain bet. The two-lane highway is not wide enough to accommodate trucks hauling the steel casks holding the waste, he said, and BLM would have to grant a new right of way for any widening.

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