Sep 21 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - John Norton The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.

About 140 people concerned about the safe transportation of radioactive materials are meeting in Pueblo this week to get updates on the industry's newest technology.

On Tuesday, about half of the conference attendees took a tour of the Transportation Technology Center, where they saw an odd-shaped, prototype rail car designed to carry spent fuel rods to a disposal site.

The transportation test center has been carrying out a battery of tests on the nuclear-materials storage car for Private Fuel Storage LLC, a company that plans to store nuclear waste in Utah. The car is being evaluated in order to meet standards of the Association of American Railroads.

The attendees at the Pueblo conference represent federal, state and tribal governments, the railroad, trucking and nuclear industries and others. The main conference is taking place at the Pueblo Convention Center.

Also at the transportation test center, the visitors received a chance to visit the center's Rail Dynamics Laboratory and to learn about its Emergency Response Training Center. The training center teaches courses on handling hazardous material spills. It draws students from around the world: rail crews, police, firemen and workers in the transportation and chemical industries.

J. Gary Lanthrum, director of the federal Department of Energy's Office of National Transportation for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said after the tour that he was not aware until Tuesday that the center offered emergency response training. "I think we will probably wind up using more than one aspect of the training programs here," Lanthrum said.

Regarding the nuclear materials rail car, Lanthrum said that while nuclear material currently is shipped by both rail and truck, the government has decided that rail is the preferred method.

There are existing rail cars certified to carry radioactive material now but PFS plans to use its own, built by Trinity Industries, to carry waste to a storage facility it's developing on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County, Utah.

The cars carrying the casks with spent fuel rods from civilian nuclear power plants each will be tested individually, as will buffer cars, the cars that will carry security escorts and the entire trains that will be used for transport.

Because the spent fuel rods contain highly radioactive material, including plutonium, they present a serious danger in case of an accident.

Ruben Pena, the transportation test center's manager for business development, said that the Pueblo center is ready to provide any testing needed, including crash tests if the Department of Energy wants.

For now, the cars are being tested as they run on the center's tracks to learn how their various components hold up during use.

The rail car prototype being tested here is basically a depressed-center flatcar with extensions to handle an extra pair of trucks, or wheel sets, added to balance the weight, improve performance on curves and prevent derailments.

Regular flat cars have two trucks with four wheels each but the PFS cars have an extra four-wheel truck at each end.

According to PFS' Web site, the cars also have electro-pneumatic braking, sensors on each wheel to monitor vibration, temperature and resistance to turning and a global positioning system unit that show the train's location at all times.

Later Tuesday, the conference covered issues in transportation of radioactive material. This morning, Pena and others are scheduled to give talks on technology and rail transportation.

Safe shipment of nuclear waste focus of two-day meet