WASHINGTON -- Nevada suffered a setback on Tuesday in its latest attempt to derail the government's plans for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

A three-judge federal court panel declined a Nevada lawsuit charging that the Energy Department had violated environmental law and federal procedures when it formed a strategy to ship radioactive spent fuel to the Nevada site.

"We conclude that some of Nevada's claims are unripe for review and the remaining claims are without merit," Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in a 26-page opinion filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Henderson was joined in the ruling by Judges Harry Edwards and A. Raymond Randolph. The judges heard oral arguments last October.

The ruling preserves the status quo for the Yucca Mountain project. The Department of Energy is studying a 318-mile corridor from Caliente across rural Nevada in which to build a railroad to the proposed repository site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"We are very pleased with the court's decision," said Craig Stevens, a DOE spokesman. "The court's ruling today upheld the transportation aspects of the department's comprehensive environmental impact statement for the Yucca Mountain Project."

Joe Egan, Nevada's lead nuclear waste attorney, said state officials are evaluating whether to appeal the ruling. Egan said the state disagreed with the court's reasoning that it was premature to challenge DOE on elements of its railroad plans.

"It is really clear that having ruled against us in such Draconian fashion it just seemed they didn't want to do anything to upset Yucca Mountain," Egan said.

Stevens said DOE attorneys are evaluating the decision for possible impacts on other parts of the project. For instance, the DOE is weighing a possible alternative railroad line to the repository through the Walker River Paiute reservation in western Nevada.

The DOE also has made other changes since the Nevada lawsuit was filed last year, including initiating redesigns for canisters that would carry nuclear waste to the repository.

"DOE has radically altered its transportation plans," Egan said. "The net effect is that it has gone ahead and started a new analysis. In a sense they have rendered their previous analysis moot."

In the court's ruling, Henderson wrote that the DOE was within its authority in how it managed environmental impact studies and other documents that supported its transportation planning.

"We conclude that DOE's analysis of the environmental impacts of its rail corridor selection in its (final environmental impact statement) is adequate," Henderson wrote.

"It is well settled that the court will not 'flyspeck' an agency's environmental analysis looking for any deficiency no matter how minor," the judge wrote.

The court declined to consider other issues raised by the state, saying it was too early and the DOE had not yet made final decisions on them.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said the state's options may be limited.

"I doubt the Supreme Court would take review and I don't think it would be worth petitioning the entire court," said Tobias, formerly a professor at the Boyd Law School at UNLV.

Rulings made by judicial panels may be reconsidered by all the judges in the appeals circuit.

But Tobias said Henderson and Randolph, who were placed on the court by President George H.W. Bush, and Edwards, who was installed by President Carter, "are very much representative of the court and I think it is pretty unlikely" that other judges would reconsider their ruling.

In the 10 months since the oral arguments, Nevada officials and attorneys had expressed confidence that the state would prevail on at least some of its arguments. They said on Tuesday they were surprised and disappointed.

"We all thought it was one of our best cases," said Bob Loux, director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. "Obviously this would have brought everything in the transportation arena to a halt."

Loux said the state probably would file new lawsuits later on the matters that the court said were premature to be considered at the present time.

The state has two other active cases pending related to the Yucca Mountain, although neither are major.

Oral arguments are set for September in Washington where the state is challenging a federal regulation dealing with repository licensing.

In a second case, state officials have filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court in Reno seeking to obtain a copy of the DOE's draft license application for the repository.