60 Minutes review of nuclear power in the U.S.

Steve Kroft recently did a piece on 60 Minutes about how the U.S. is behind the times when it comes to nuclear power. Although we have almost 25% of all the worlds power reactors, our current fleet is getting old and will need replacing. Something the rest of the world is already working on. More importantly to me is the current status of our spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, it’s non-existent except on a lab scale. Bottom line: The United States must reprocess nuclear fuel, and we must come up with a safe, secure monitored retrievable storage plan. I highly recommend you watch the video (it’s only ~13 minutes long) it’s informative and shows that the U.S. media is finally getting smart about the current nuclear industry instead of talking about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

If you have any comments/questions, please post them below.

pdfTEX, Adobe Reader 8.0 problem

I recently downloaded Adobe Reader 8.0 and the latest MikTeX/TexnicCenter builds (due to the ineptitude of Toshiba in repairing my tablet without wiping the harddrive). The problem arises when you compile the tex file as “tex==>pdf”, if you already have a copy of the output file open, pdfTEX will not create a new file and gives the error: “I can’t write to the file [filename]“. There is fairly simple fix for this, though it took a while to find. Essentially you have to add in a few commands to tell TC to instruct Reader to close the file before compiling the new one. This thread describes how to fix the problem in TexnicCenter, I’m sure there are similar ways to do it with other frontends but as I use TC…

Scroll down most of the page till you see a screenshot. Then in TC go to “Build > Define Output Profiles > “Latex==>PDF” > Viewer and make these changes: [Note: the text fields in the screenshot are incorrect, use the text below instead]

The text fields should read:

view: [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][FileOpen("%bm.pdf")]
(server: acroview, Topic: control, for all of these)

forward search: exactly the same as view

close: [DocOpen("%bm.pdf")][DocClose("%bm.pdf")]

You may need to reboot after making these changes in order for them to work. If they work you will be able to have multiple .pdf files open and only the one you are compiling in TeX will close upon compiling.