The nuclear crisis in Japan is reviving a battle over what should be done with the spent nuclear fuel that has been piling up around the U.S. for decades.

Under a 2002 law, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is the designated repository site for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste—which consists mostly of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants. But the construction and opening of the repository has stalled amid political and legal fights. The waste has mostly stayed at the dozens of commercial nuclear reactors where it was generated.

So far, the U.S. has generated roughly 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste—enough to fill a football field more than 15 feet deep, according to the Government Accountability Office. The GAO has projected that number will more than double to 153,000 metric tons by 2055.

Federal regulators say current methods of storing the waste at power plants are safe and can continue to be so for decades. Yet in light of the overheating of spent fuel at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, some elected officials have renewed calls to remove waste from nuclear plants, many of which are near heavily populated areas.

In a letter Monday to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jaczko and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, officials in Massachusetts urged the Obama administration to address the storage issue, saying some nuclear plants in or near Massachusetts use the same kind of fuel storage as the Fukushima plant.

“The events in Japan show that a breach can occur,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and state Senate President Therese Murray in their letter. They urged the administration to establish interim central repositories for the waste, though they didn’t specify Yucca Mountain.

The Obama administration is in a tight political spot. The plan for Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is fiercely opposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), a crucial ally of President Barack Obama.

The administration has asked the NRC for permission to withdraw a license application for the Yucca project. The Energy Department said in a filing with the NRC last year that Dr. Chu’s judgment “is not that Yucca Mountain is unsafe…but rather that it is not a workable option and that alternatives will better serve the public interest.”

Dr. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who in 2008 co-signed a paper with nine other scientists endorsing Yucca’s use, now says any policy to address nuclear waste must be based “not only on sound scientific analysis,” but on “achieving consensus, including the communities directly affected.”

“It has been clear for many years that Yucca Mountain did not enjoy that kind of consensus,” Dr. Chu said in a letter last month.

Nevada has opposed the project on the grounds that Yucca’s geology is incapable of isolating the waste and that an accident or terrorist attack along the proposed truck and train routes to deliver the waste could hurt or kill thousands. Washington and South Carolina, meanwhile, say the Obama administration’s effort to pull the plug on Yucca is illegal and are challenging it in court.

The nuclear-power industry, through its main trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, has said a permanent storage site such as Yucca Mountain is the safest long-term way to manage waste, and that the government’s delay “has forced nuclear power plants to store used fuel on site for longer than originally intended.”

Without a permanent storage place, the NRC has allowed nuclear-plant operators to store spent fuel either in enclosed, steel-lined concrete pools of water, or in steel or reinforced-concrete containers, known as casks. In 2006 and 2007, California and Massachusetts petitioned the NRC to examine the risk of fires involving waste stored in the pools. The NRC concluded the risk of a dangerous accident or fire was low.

Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser for the Energy Department, says the nuclear industry has raised the risk of a fire by reconfiguring its pools over the years to squeeze in more fuel.

In 2003, Mr. Alvarez and a group of experts on U.S. nuclear policy published a paper that suggested the risks could be reduced by moving some of the spent fuel from the pools to the dry casks—one of the suggestions the Massachusetts officials made in their letter.

An NRC spokesman responded that the agency continued to believe it was safe to store spent fuel in both pools and in dry casks, but that the agency would “look at that issue” as part of a broader review of nuclear plant safety in the wake of the Fukushima crisis.

“There may be some things about the vulnerability of spent fuel pools that will be learned as a result of the Japanese accident that will cause us to rethink what we do in the U.S.,” said Richard Meserve, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He is now a member of a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the Obama administration last year to examine the future of nuclear-waste storage in the U.S.

The Nuclear Energy Institute and some power companies have sued to compel the Obama administration to suspend collection of the one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour surcharge that consumers pay on their electric bills to pay for the waste’s removal. The fund has a balance of $24 billion.

The fate of Yucca Mountain, meanwhile, remains unresolved. The NRC hasn’t said when it would make a decision on the administration’s request to cancel the project.

—Jeffrey Ball contributed to this article.Write to Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com