Utah leaders had hoped to huddle today with visiting U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and urge him to keep fighting a nuclear-waste storage site planned for Tooele County’s Skull Valley. But Salazar’s tight schedule nixed the idea late Monday.

Meanwhile, an attorney for the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, which aims to host the western Utah storage site, questioned why the government would spend taxpayer money on a “frivolous appeal” of a sound judicial ruling.

“The appeal is not justified,” said the Goshutes’ attorney, Tim Vollmann.

Last week’s decision by a federal judge breathed new life into controversial plans to store 150-ton casks of used nuclear fuel aboveground on the Skull Valley reservation. For nearly four years, those plans appeared to be dead after the Interior Department denied two vital approvals: one for a right of way for a waste-transfer site and the other for a lease agreement between the Goshutes and their electric-industry partners.

U.S. Judge David Ebel threw out those denials in a July 26 ruling, and Gov. Gary Herbert and all five members of Utah’s congressional delegation want Salazar to promise that his department will help block the site.

“It could not be clearer that the [Interior] department acted in good faith and made a reasoned decision based upon the facts,” said Utah’s delegation in a joint letter Friday to Salazar. “Therefore, we respectfully request the department appeal the decision of the district court.”

The Skull Valley Band and Private Fuel Storage — a consortium of utilities that helped secure a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to develop the storage site — would put their right-of-way and lease-agreement requests back before the Interior Department under last week’s court ruling.

Vollmann insisted the case is not “procedural,” as U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has said. Rather, the lawyer said, the judge noted numerous times when Interior Department officials ignored or overlooked relevant information supporting the band’s request.

One example: Bush administration Interior officials fretted that waste might be abandoned in Utah if a permanent federal disposal site never materializes. But they ignored that storage contracts already provide a remedy by specifically requiring the Skull Valley waste to be returned to its owners if a government repository is not built by the time the lease expires.

“We had alleged it was a political decision,” Vollmann said, “and we still believe it.”

If the Skull Valley project is built as planned, it would provide storage for as long as 50 years for up to 44,000 tons of used fuel rods from nuclear power plants — waste that is stored at dozens of reactors throughout the U.S. as it awaits permanent disposal someday at a federal facility. The government’s Yucca Mountain disposal site has been stymied, and a federal panel now is looking for a new alternative.

Meanwhile, Salazar plans to attend “listening sessions” for America’s Great Outdoors Initiative today in Salt Lake City.

In addition, Utah’s U.S. House members — Republicans Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop and Democrat Jim Matheson — and the governor hope to buttonhole the secretary on the Goshute-PFS appeal. The Interior boss cut short his Utah trip to travel to Houston this afternoon to oversee efforts to cap the Gulf oil spill. So, instead of meeting privately with Salazar, the House members were offered the option late Monday to meet with the secretary’s adviser, Alan Gilbert, at Matheson’s Salt Lake City office.

Herbert spokeswoman Angie Welling said the governor hopes to use any time he gets with Interior officials to forge a strategy on how to deal with the waste site plans going forward.

“He remains opposed to it,” Welling said, “just as the delegation does.”

The delegation’s letter opposing the waste site notes that the aboveground facility would be on a key flight path for and adjacent to the Utah Test and Training Range, the nation’s largest designated area for training fighter pilots and testing munitions.