SALT LAKE CITY -- The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday rejected a nuclear waste stockpile at an American Indian reservation in Utah's west desert.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the decision kills a plan to store 44,000 tons of spent fuel rods on the Goshute Indians' Skull Valley reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

But a spokeswoman for the utility consortium that won a license for the storage site suggested it was premature to call it dead.

The Interior Department used its power to veto a lease Goshute leaders approved for the stockpile. The agency also refused to yield federal land for a transfer station where fuel rods would be transferred from rail cars to tractor-trailers.

It was the final obstacle for Private Fuel Storage, known as PFS, a group of nuclear-power utilities that won a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February.

''PFS is dead,'' Hatch said. ''To me, it's a great day for Utah.''

The Interior Department's refusal came in two decisions totaling 47 pages released to The Associated Press by Hatch's office. Private Fuel Storage said it had not been informed.

''We have not seen the decisions or figured out what our options may be,'' PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said. ''For that reason, I don't think it's safe to say that PFS is dead.

''Hatch would want you to believe that PFS has no options, but I don't know if that's true,'' she said.

A public-health group also adopted a cautious posture.

''We're a little hesitant to declare full victory on this because PFS has a license. It's like having a license but no car, and they've been told to stay off the road,'' said Vanessa Pierce, executive director of Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

In one decision, a high-ranking Interior official overruled a Bureau of Indian Affairs subordinate who gave conditional approval in 1997 for the PFS lease on reservation land. The report said the subordinate, who wasn't named, exceeded his authority.

That decision referred frequently to judgments made by the Interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, but it was signed by his associate deputy secretary, James E. Cason, who was carrying out duties of Indian Affairs secretary, a position that's currently vacant, a department spokesman said.

Cason decided nuclear waste threatened the ''long-term viability of the Skull Valley Goshutes reservation as a homeland'' for 125 enrolled members, though only about 30 members live on the 18,540-acre reservation.

PFS was to have leased 820 acres in a corner of the reservation.

In the other decision, Chad Calvert, acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, denied PFS the right to run a rail spur across a wilderness area or build a transfer station on federal land.

The Interior Department said Kempthorne -- Idaho's former governor -- delegated decisions to Cason and Calvert and didn't make any himself.

Cason said two recent developments worked against the plan for nuclear waste storage. One came in January, when President Bush created a 100,000-acre Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area, cutting off the potential for a rail spur PFS wanted to build down the length of Skull Valley to the reservation.

And in 2004, Salt Lake City and other communities began sending baled trash to the reservation for disposal, adding more than 130 truck trips a day onto narrow State Route 196 in Skull Valley.

PFS, looking for an alternative to a rail spur to deliver spent uranium fuel, would have added ''slow moving, 150-foot-long heavy haul trucks traveling with a frequency of about two per week.'' The department said that was too much traffic and wear for a two-lane road without shoulders.

U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, ''rejoiced'' at news of the rejection, saying, ''now we can celebrate the demise of this dangerous disposal scheme.''

Private Fuel Storage billed the Goshute stockpile as temporary until the federal government can open a national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Yet Matheson said Utah could have become a ''de facto'' home for nuclear waste given troubles at the Yucca project, which he said won't open until 2017, if then.

''Utahns stand united against the East Coast dumping its nuclear garbage on the West. Today's decisions prove that perseverance pays and I couldn't be more relieved,'' Matheson said.