A "no trespassing" sign outside the proposed nuclear waste dump site of Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

WASHINGTON – The federal government's dormant plan to store nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain is showing signs of life amid a new push by the Trump administration and some members of Congress to revive the long-delayed project.

But opponents, including Nevada's two senators, already are mobilizing to halt the project's momentum, again casting doubts on the nation's efforts to establish a nuclear waste repository.

"Nevada does not want to turn into a nuclear waste dump, and as long as I'm in the U.S. Senate, I'll make sure that Yucca Mountain remains dead," said Sen. Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican who is facing a tough re-election challenge this fall.

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The House voted 340-72 last month to direct the Department of Energy to resume the licensing process for a nuclear waste facility in Yucca Mountain, a remote section of the Mojave Desert that sits about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Congress selected Yucca Mountain in 1987 to become the nation's permanent repository for nuclear waste generated by utility power plants and the military.

The government already has spent $15 billion studying the location, and the Energy Department began pursuing a license for the facility in 2008. But the Obama administration abandoned the project three years later amid intense opposition from residents and political leaders in Nevada, including Harry Reid, who at the time was the Senate's top Democrat.

Not only would the House-passed bill resume the licensing process, it would for the first time set in motion a plan for developing a temporary, private storage site in New Mexico or Texas for tons of nuclear waste now stored at nuclear facilities across the country.

Supporters of the Yucca Mountain project view that as a significant development. Interim storage is needed, they say, because the licensing process for a permanent site at Yucca Mountain could take up to five years.

Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have pushed temporary-storage legislation for years but were forced to retreat after the nuclear industry insisted that interim storage should be tied to completing the licensing review process for Yucca Mountain.

The House's decision to include an interim storage provision in its bill was clearly an attempt to offer the Senate a compromise, said Rod McCullum of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association for the nuclear technology industry.

That, along with the lopsided, bipartisan vote in favor of the House legislation, could offer the breakthrough that has been needed to push the bill through the Senate, McCullum said.

"When one side offers to compromise, that puts the onus on the other side to do something," McCullum said. "There are going to be challenges … but there is a lot of momentum here."

Alexander, who chairs the Senate's Energy and Water Development appropriations subcommittee, praised the House for recognizing that "moving ahead with private interim storage is an important way to address nuclear waste and (that) we should move ahead as quickly as possible on any solution that gets a result."

Proponents of the Yucca Mountain project say it's long past time for the federal government to keep its 3-decade-old promise to taxpayers, ratepayers and communities across the country to permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel and defense waste.

Some 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel are being stored at nuclear power plants in 121 communities in 39 states because no repository has been developed for its permanent disposal. That's enough to fill a football field 10 yards deep if stacked end to end and side by side.

The Trump administration favors storing the nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, and the president's proposed budget for the coming fiscal year includes $120 million to revive the stalled project.

But Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, and members of Nevada's congressional delegation continue to resist, arguing that turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear dumping ground poses health and environmental risks and could harm the state's tourism industry.

Heller has introduced legislation that would permit the construction of a nuclear waste repository only if the Energy secretary receives written consent from the governor of the host state, affected local officials and affected Indian tribes.

Heller and the state's junior senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, are threatening to block the House bill from moving in the Senate. Heller already has put a hold on the legislation.

"A state without a single nuclear power plant should not have to shoulder the entire nation's nuclear waste burden," Heller said.

Cortez Masto pronounced the bill "dead on arrival" and called the Yucca Mountain project "a massive waste of taxpayer dollars."

Meanwhile, funding to revive Yucca Mountain remains in doubt.

A defense policy bill passed late last month by the House authorizes $30 million to store the military's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. The Senate version of that legislation, however, authorizes no Yucca Mountain funding.

A separate spending bill for energy and water projects could provide another vehicle for funding the project. In the House, a draft version of that bill contains $268 million to resume the Yucca Mountain licensing process. The Senate version, which has yet to be approved, doesn't include any Yucca Mountain funding but would authorize money for a pilot interim storage facility. The exact amount hasn't yet been determined.

The final version of both bills will have to be resolved by negotiators for the House and the Senate.

Regardless, McCullum senses that, after years of delay, the Yucca Mountain project may finally be put back on track.

The lingering question of what will be done about the spent fuel has damaged the nuclear industry's reputation, he said.

"We are trying to advance this industry," he said. But, "when you have this albatross around your neck — and it's a costly albatross — that's not a good business model."