The government has set aside a 130-mile stretch of land through central Nevada so that the Energy Department can study whether it wants to use it to build a rail line to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, officials said.

The federal Bureau of Land Management withdrew the mile-wide corridor from Hawthorne to Goldfield from public use and withdrew an additional 107 square miles of property along portions of a previously designated study route from Caliente to the Yucca Mountain site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The moves became official with a Wednesday posting in the Federal Register in Washington, D.C.

Setting aside 140,000 acres along the so-called 130-mile Mina corridor means that no new mining or property claims can be made, said Dennis Samuelson, a BLM realty specialist in Reno. It forbids the government from selling or trading the land. Grazing and other public access are not restricted.

The land withdrawals will allow the Energy Department to conduct environmental studies of the rail routes to the proposed nuclear repository.

The Mina route would run north-south and could cost less than a 319-mile east-west rail line proposed from Caliente, near the Utah border, across rural Nevada to the waste site. The Energy Department had said it favored the Caliente route, but the cost has been estimated at $2 billion.

There is no rail line to the Yucca Mountain site, which Congress and the Bush administration picked in 2002 as the place to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive waste now being stored at nuclear reactors in 39 states. The project has been stalled by funding shortfalls and questions about quality control during site selection.