WASHINGTON - The Energy Department said Tuesday it cannot meet a court and congressionally imposed deadline to begin taking highly radioactive nuclear power plant wastes off the hands of the nation's electric utilities.

The department formally notified the utilities it will be unable to take possession of about 30,000 tons of the spent nuclear fuel rods Jan 31, 1998, and sought their advice on "how the delay can best be accommodated."

An industry spokesman said utilities would make the same recommendation they made in 1994: Congress should pass legislation to let the Energy Department transport dangerous nuclear garbage to a single storage site.

"The nuclear industry believes a solution to this problem that meets everyone's requirements demands legislation during this Congress," said Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "It is in everyone's best interest to ... put this issue behind us."

The Washington Public Power Supply System already has made plans to build a $40 million facility to store spent fuel from its reactor north of Richland. The existing storage pool now has about 1,340 spent fuel assemblies, with room for about 500 more. Space in the pool will run out in 1999.

Since the 1970s, utilities have been storing the radioactive debris in large pools of water near 100 reactor sites in 34 states. They now say they are running out of room.

A 1982 law required the federal government to take possession of the wastes in 1998 and bury it permanently at a centralized dump deep underground. The facility was to be financed by a tax imposed on all nuclear-generated electricity.

But the process has been embroiled in scientific and political controversies over whether it possible to build such a facility capable of containing the wastes for the tens of thousands of years they pose a potential hazard and where to put it.

For at least a decade the government has favored a site in the Nevada desert. The Senate voted last year to move the wastes to a temporary storage facility there, but the House took no action on it the legislation and President Clinton promised a veto if it reached his desk.