WASHINGTON -- Nevada officials have decided not to appeal a Yucca Mountain court ruling that the state lost this summer, an official said Thursday.

Lawyers concluded the chances were small that judges would agree to rehear the case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

In an Aug. 8 ruling, a three-judge panel dismissed Nevada's claims that the Department of Energy violated environmental law and federal rules when it began putting together a shipping program for the proposed nuclear waste repository.

The court concluded that some of Nevada's claims were premature while others were without merit.

It said the state could resurrect its lawsuit later.

"The odds are so small (for appeal), and the court has invited us back," Loux said.

The state raised a series of technical objections to the Energy Department's final environmental impact statement for Yucca Mountain.

It also challenged the department's decision to designate a 319-mile railroad corridor as its favored route to ship waste from Caliente in eastern Nevada to the Yucca site.

Loux said the Energy Department seemed to have changed course already on one of Nevada's concerns.

He said a plan to load nuclear waste-filled truck casks onto trains for shipment to Nevada appeared to be no longer operative since the Energy Department now envisioned new multipurpose canisters for the task.