Managers of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project outlined their new "path forward" plan for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff Wednesday.

But one critic at the meeting, Steve Frishman, a full-time consultant for Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency, said the plan amounts to a path backward that puts the beleaguered project "back to square one after 20 years."

"They made it very clear they have no schedule at all for certification or a license application," Frishman said during a break in the meeting.

The new plan announced in October by the Department of Energy differs from the course that DOE had been pursuing because it relies on spent fuel assemblies to be sealed in standardized waste canisters and shipped in transportation casks to a surface facility near Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Instead of taking the spent fuel assemblies out and repackaging them for disposal in a maze of tunnels in the mountain, the sealed canisters will be sorted for "aging," or a cooling down of their thermal heat, before they are put in a steel and nickel-alloy package for disposal.

Each transportation cask will be checked for leaks by sampling gases inside the casks when they arrive, said Paul Harrington, acting director of DOE's Office of Project Management and Engineering.

The new strategy requires dramatic changes in the design of above-ground facilities, he said.

Frishman said the "path forward" plan will take years before it passes reviews and a new design is in place.

And, with news this week that a special rail line to haul waste casks to the mountain would cost $2 billion, or more than twice DOE's first estimate, Frishman said he doubts that the line ever will be built.

"And it's going to be really hard to get those big containers here without the railroad," he said. "It's really amazing they're having this conversation now."