Maine Yankee’s decision last week to sue the U.S. Department of Energy was the result of long years of frustration over the hotest political issue surrounding nuclear power: where to put the waste. The suit might not get Yankee officials what they say they want but it does give them strong bargaining power.

The Energy Department was supposed to have a permanent site ready to accept nuclear waste from around the nation by the end of January. The department is obviously nowhere close to meeting that requirement. It has not even decided whether the one site it is exploring, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is suitable. The earliest that site could accept waste is 2011.

That makes nuclear-waste storage an expensive problem — expensive especially to power customers. Maine Yankee ratepayers have so far contributed $67 million of the $14 billion collected by the DOE for high-level waste storage. Yankee estimates that it will cost customers an additional $128 million to store and manage the waste while it is waiting for the feds to find a permanent site.

Suing DOE to accept the spent nuclear fuel as soon as possible puts pressure on the department to accept the waste at an interim site, as a bill in Congress would have it do. The Clinton administration does not want to do this and threatens to veto that legislation, forcing the nuclear facilities, states and feds into a game of nuclear hot potato. Nobody wants the waste, partly because nobody wants the responsibility or the cost of storing it.

There’s a likely bargain in the works here: Let the nuclear facilities keep the waste — for now — and force the DOE to pay their costs. Maine Yankee might add another $9 million for the cost of reracking its fuel assemblies onto its cost estimate of $128 million and could send the bill to the DOE. The federal government escapes accepting waste it is not prepared to store permanently, and, most importantly, customers don’t get stuck with a higher bill because of the failure of DOE to find a site.

A caution: Ratepayers won’t save much if the administration uses tax dollars to pay for storage at the nuclear facilities. DOE budgeted its collections from the facilities as if it would be operating a long-term storage site now. Payments for storage at the facilities should come from those funds and from the existing DOE budget.

Maine Yankee and other nuclear plants have the DOE in a tight corner over its failure to find a site. If the facilities play this right, they could save customers considerably in the near future.