I used to really enjoy doing homework. Maybe I am just wierd.

French State owned absolutely cut through red tape. Some people objected, the French government said "meh" and built them where it wanted anyway. Given it was sold as a national security issue, avoiding reliance on oil imports for power, objections were relatively muted, though.

There are more variables at play here as they are still specialised items requiring specialised materials and skills. They are also less efficient, potentially increasing the demand for uranium and cost. It is likely that capital cost would reduce with volume production, but it might not reduce TCO. It would reduce capital risk in some purchase scenarios if a lower price as it means a smaller outlay prior to production, but it's still only viable if any costs due to lower efficiency of uranium use are offset by any operational cost reductions or there is sufficient power in the marketplace to offset any higher operational cost. And by marketplace, I include subsidy. Using a new design is risky so initial adoption might be challenging if no one wants to go first whereas, even given that all large plants are to some extent "one offs", there's still a lot of proven technology employed to reduce the overall risk profile. Given that, the combination of reduced capital expenditure and TCO calculations are probably going to need to be quite persuasive. I personally wouldn't want to wager whether SMRs will be successful or not. It's a potentially attractive concept, but the devil will be in the detail.

A nuclear powered ice breaker is not trying to produce electricity that is "too cheap to meter" so it's an absurd comparison. The raison d'etre for a nuclear ice breaker is to pack the maximum power into a small space as the deliverable is a path through the ice, not electricity at a commercially viable price.

One of the arguments is that if it requires subsidy (and it seems to), perhaps the state should own it, which could also be applied to renewables. But you can also argue that non-intermittent supply is a public good which warrants subsidy without ownership, provided the contractual basis supports the public good.

The issue isn't so much producing SMRs at scale but producing them so incredibly cheaply that given that they are less cost effective to operate the overall TCO is sufficiently low. It does potentially have the advantage of allowing more incremental deployment and generally reduced financial risk profile even at the same TCO, which would make funding easier. The world's current experience is that the current TCO requires subsidy, though.

Hinckley C is on an existing site. It still proved to be difficult, initially due to getting funding and securing sufficient subsidy, and then the complexity of building it.

WW1 happened the same year as the assassination, not more than 40 years later. The comparison is absolute nonsense. Even you can usually do better in your desperation to blame Democrats despite nuclear power build costs being a problem everywhere that there is a somewhat free market. Or did the Democrats also manage to make it expensive in the UK too?

The term AI is very old but it used to mean something different.

And what proportion of university research staff earn that much?

P.S. the correct term is an artic (for articulated) but people often say arctic. If you had a lorry with soft sides and took the covering and hoops off, people would probably refer to it as a truck despite it being the same vehicle. If you then put a hard-sided structure on the back and painted the logo of a home removals firm on it, the same vehicle would become a van. Overpaint that with that of a trucking company and it would become a lorry again.

Lorry generally but not exclusively refers to smaller vehicles but may also refer to larger ones, but that's more common with older people. Larger vehicles tend to be called trucks, although some smaller vehicles such as rubbish collection vehicles may also be trucks and it may also be used to refer to pick up trucks, even those they are rare. The large vehicles may also be referred to as arctics. Smaller lorries may also be called vans - a lorry for moving house will normally be called a van even though most vans are smaller. And a van for moving house is about the same size as a truck for waste disposal. A lorrry with a flat bed is also likely to be referred to as a truck. So that's all clear.

Google Maps says 3h20m, so Mr. Issac is correct.

If drivers don't tend to work more than about a year, then it can't be truck driving that is lowering their life expectancy.

4 weeks? That would be a low figure for vacation in Europe. It's more like 6.