Country's first Buddhist fraternity sits at SDSU

The U.S. military's stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported

Source: Military Times

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed. The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.

In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war's expense, manpower requirements and human toll. Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters.

Most alarming is the prospect this data has been incomplete since the war on terrorism began in October 2001. If that is the case, it would fundamentally undermine confidence in much of what the Pentagon has disclosed about its prosecution of these wars, prompt critics to call into question whether the military sought to mislead the American public, and cast doubt on the competency with which other vital data collection is being performed and publicized. Those other key metrics include American combat casualties, taxpayer expense and the militarys overall progress in degrading enemy capabilities.

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Read more: http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/airstrikes-unreported-syria-iraq-afghanistan-islamic-state-al-qaeda-taliban

Space Farming: Satellite's Greenhouses to Simulate Moon, Mars Gravity (launches this year)

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Areva deal signals chilled French-Chinese nuclear partnership

Source: Nikkei

China is crucial for growth, but two sides fail to agree on terms

PARIS -- Troubled French reactor builder Areva has agreed to accept equity stakes from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Japan Nuclear Fuel. But missing from the list is a Chinese backer, signaling cooling Sino-Franco relations in the nuclear sector.

Reforms, including the injection of fresh capital, are essential for growth of Areva, CEO Philippe Knoche told a shareholders meeting Friday. Shareholders are expected to approve a capital increase of some 5 billion euros ($5.39 billion).

The French government will provide 4.5 billion euros of that. Mitsubishi Heavy and Japan Nuclear Fuel will pick up the rest in exchange for separate 5% stakes in nuclear fuel reprocessing unit NewCo.

After cost overruns while constructing a reactor in Finland, the French group had posted its fifth straight annual net loss through the year ended December 2015. The cumulative losses for the five years reach well north of $8 billion, prompting the company to seek capital relief.

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Read more: http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Areva-deal-signals-chilled-French-Chinese-nuclear-partnership

Frances Next President May Face $3 Billion Nuclear Hangover

Source: Bloomberg

- Not enough left in the kitty to bail out both EDF and Areva

- Sale of assets from phone company to Renault may be considered

Whoever succeeds Francois Hollande as France’s president may find one of their first tasks in office will be selling off some of the nation’s prized assets to prop up the state’s nuclear industry.

That’s because the government is as much as 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) short of the 7.5 billion euros it has said it needs this year to fix the financial problems of Areva SA and Electricite de France SA, said two government officials with direct knowledge of the matter. Hollande will try to find an answer before he leaves office in June, one of the people said. If he can’t, his successor must decide how to plug the gap, said the other person.

France is preparing to rescue its nuclear industry after EDF was weakened by falling European power prices and Areva lost billions on a long-delayed project in Finland. The president must either increase the national debt or weigh politically sensitive privatizations of holdings in anything from automakers such as Renault SA to the former phone monopoly -- a tall order with the first round of presidential elections just three months away.

“It’s not that simple to raise these funds, either because of market conditions or for strategic or social reasons,” said Senator Maurice Vincent, a member of the ruling Socialist Party who sits on the finance committee. “Half of the holdings are in the depressed energy sector which needs to be bailed out, and a quarter is in the defense sector where you have limited divestment leeway, so that doesn’t leave much wiggle room.”



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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-03/france-s-next-president-said-to-face-3-billion-nuclear-hangover

Battered Toshiba seeks exit from UK, India in nuclear retreat: sources

Source: Reuters

Toshiba Corp plans to withdraw from its lead role in projects to build nuclear plants in Britain and India, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, marking a retreat as it wrestles with an imminent multi-billion dollar writedown.

Such a move would leave Toshiba's U.S.-based Westinghouse focused on the much narrower field of nuclear reactors and services, rather than civil engineering for nuclear power plants, or their construction, the sources said.

But it would throw into question the future of a key plank in Britain's plans to replace ageing nuclear reactors, and the future of India's biggest nuclear project to date.

Toshiba became one of the nuclear sector's biggest players with the purchase of Westinghouse in 2006, the height of a short-lived boom. But the industry was left battered by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and Toshiba's woes have only deepened - first with a 2015 accounting scandal and now damaging cost overruns at U.S. projects.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-idUSKBN15I0VG

Fukushima nuclear reactor radiation at highest level since 2011 meltdown

Source: Guardian

Radiation levels inside a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station are at their highest since the plant suffered a triple meltdown almost six years ago.

The facility’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said atmospheric readings as high as 530 sieverts an hour had been recorded inside the containment vessel of reactor No 2, one of three reactors that experienced a meltdown when the plant was crippled by a huge tsunami that struck the north-east coast of Japan in March 2011.

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The recent reading, described by some experts as “unimaginable”, is far higher than the previous record of 73 sieverts an hour in that part of the reactor.

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Tepco also said image analysis had revealed a hole in metal grating beneath the same reactor’s pressure vessel. The one-metre-wide hole was probably created by nuclear fuel that melted and then penetrated the vessel after the tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi’s back-up cooling system.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/03/fukushima-daiichi-radiation-levels-highest-since-2011-meltdown

NASA Jupiter Probe Makes 4th Flyby of Giant Planet

Source: Space.com

NASA's Juno spacecraft has flown by Jupiter for the fourth time.

Juno skimmed about 2,670 miles (4,300 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops at 7:57 a.m. EST (1257 GMT) this morning (Feb. 2), zooming by at 129,000 mph (208,000 km/h) relative to the giant planet, NASA officials said.

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Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit that brings it close to the gas giant just once every 53 days. Most mission-relevant data is gathered during these flybys, the previous three of which occurred last August, October and December.

Though mission scientists are still analyzing the information collected during these previous encounters, they have already learned some interesting things.

"Revelations include that Jupiter's magnetic fields and aurora are bigger and more powerful than originally thought and that the belts and zones that give the gas giant's cloud top its distinctive look extend deep into the planet's interior," NASA officials wrote in a statement today. "Peer-reviewed papers with more in-depth science results from Juno's first three flybys are expected to be published within the next few months."

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Read more: http://www.space.com/35562-nasa-juno-spacecraft-4th-jupiter-flyby.html

NASA Makes an EPIC Update to Website for Daily Earth Pics

Source: NASA

NASA has upgraded its website that provides daily views of the Earth from one million miles away. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera imagery website was recently updated allowing the public to choose natural or enhanced color images of the Earth and even zoom into an area on the globe.

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The website was initially launched in 2015 after NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR satellite achieved orbit almost one million miles from Earth. DSCOVR is a NOAA Earth observation and space weather satellite launched by Space-X on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle on February 11, 2015 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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The website also contains galleries of images and animations from specific events like moon transits. The basic information about the EPIC camera is in the “EPIC" section, and information about the imagery is found in the "About" section. A link to NOAA’s site is in the “DSCOVR" section.

DSCOVR is a partnership between NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. NOAA is operating DSCOVR from its NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Maryland, and will process the space weather data at the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado. From there, the SWPC will distribute the DSCOVR data to users within the United States and around the world. The data will be archived at NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, also in Boulder.

EPIC's website can be found at: http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/

For the DSCOVR website, visit:

https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/dscovr-deep-space-climate-observatory


Read more: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-makes-an-epic-update-to-website-for-daily-earth-pics