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CARSON CITY, Nev. — Nevada has petitioned to get Sandia National Laboratories of Albuquerque investigated for what the state's attorney general describes as a focus on deadlines over safety and accuracy in its analysis of a proposed nuclear waste dump.

Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto on Tuesday also told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is considering licensing for the federal Department of Energy dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, that Sandia should be barred from further Yucca project work for the DOE.

A Sandia spokesman defended the work questioned in the petition, the latest in a long list of moves by Nevada officials to prevent the DOE from using the dump to store high-level radioactive waste from around the country.

The lab is "confident in the integrity of its work and its management of this effort," said Sandia spokesman Michael Padilla.

In Nevada's petition, Cortez Masto told the NRC that the state found documents showing, among other things, that the Sandia official responsible for Yucca Mountain scientific analyses told employees they'd be "all out of a job" unless they met a DOE schedule for filing the license by June 30.

She said the official told staffers that Sandia's priorities for completing the analyses sought by the DOE were "schedule, defensibility and credibility - in that order."

"This attitude is utterly incompatible with the dictates of nuclear safety," Cortez Masto said. Putting safety at the bottom of the priority list, she added, "is a recipe for disaster."

Padilla countered, saying the Sandia team "will be pleased in 2008 to defend the license application and its technical basis."

"The transparency and quality of the technical basis provided in part by Sandia will enable the NRC to openly and fairly evaluate the safety of the proposed repository," he said.

The federal government is mandated by law to dispose of the nation's nuclear waste, and the Energy Department was supposed to open the Nevada site by 1998. But the Yucca Mountain project has been slowed by lawsuits, quality control concerns and funding shortfalls.

Project officials have pushed back the target date for opening to 2017 or later. The project's cost has climbed from a $57.5 billion estimate in 2001 to more than $77 billion.

Federal law limits the dump to 77,000 tons of such waste, although the DOE now is proposing to double that amount.