To catch whistleblowers without owing the NSA anything. There's apparently (ten year old info) a lot of foreign collected data that becomes "US eyes only" and getting something reclassified is not trivial.
Also there has been noise about using it to track down copyright violations, also not worth the NSA's time.
Plus we don't really know how much is collected with carnivore or whatever the current Five Eyes system is. It may not actually be slurping up everything.

The ALP want to appear to offer a "united front" on anything related to security or terrorism because of the "if you are not with us you are with the enemy" approach the government has pushed on occasion. Also the individuals in the ALP don't know enough about the issue to think it's important enough to pick a fight over. That's a bit of an artifact of many Australian politicians starting their career from student politics and having little exposure to anything else outside politics, so metadata to them is just "computer shit" and nothing of importance.
Very disappointing but not unexpected since Conroy of the ALP was pushing for similar things when he had the power to do so.

There is a comma which is meant to inform the reader that the first thing may not be the same as the second thing, but yes I could have put it in a different sentence.
Try reading it as:
The AP1000 reactors in China seem to be taking a while.
That reactor in Sweden (Forsmark upgrade) is taking a while (since 2004).

FFS - They all use air as the heat sink via fucking huge cooling towers filled with a lot of water. While they don't actually lose much water you still need a fair bit to start with.

Well I went from drawing board to AutoCAD, then on from there (pov, blender), and I still do a lot of time saving stuff with arcs as if I had a compass. The interface may change but the geometry doesn't and IMHO that's the really hard bit, especially in 3D.
However I'm not a 3D art professional and ugly but reasonably accurate visualisations of objects have been enough for me. For that level of operation the hard bit is not a changing GUI.

I once installed Blender but its all unfriendly as f***

It makes AutoCAD look nice. Squeezing 3D onto a 2D screen with a million options on what to do with it is messy no matter which way you shake it. Commercial packages sometimes hide what they think you don't want to use at the moment which makes them look simple to start with but frustrating later when you have a choice of twisty menu options or a truckload of icons.

Now, you either need to rebuilt it all from scratch, or you're not allowed to make money off your work.

Or buy a licence.

Surely a professional is going to be able to pick up how to use different software quickly enough that's it's going to make little difference in the long run which one they started with?

No so hard when you are using obsolete 1970's French technology.
The AP1000 reactors in China seem to be taking a while though and that's probably a better comparison, as is that reactor in Sweden that's been taking a while.

But you're missing the real point. Modern nuclear plants don't need that much water.

Why do people chime in while knowing so little about their pet topic? Large nuclear plants need access to vast amounts of water purely due to the way the loop of steam through the turbines work - the bigger the heat source the more cooling water you need. The water is not consumed, tied up for that use only or irradiated in any way, but you do need it to be there. It's an issue in choosing a site but after that the water can go down river or whatever, however one of the most simple facts about large nuclear, or any other large thermal power plant, is that you need to put them next to a lot of water and you need to move a vast amount of cooling water through the condensors if you are going to get much use out of the steam.

Passive cooling towers ... massively reduce the water requirements

Not enough to reduce the requirements below that of a decent sized lake that could supply a city with water for a few years.

it's something completely different to give them a machine for making plutonium

But the Russian's would never do that! They're the good guys, not like those sneaky Canadians that sold India the reactor they used to produce their bomb materials!
In case it wasn't obvious the above was an attempt at a joke based around the idea that this plant will be seen by the buyers as a step towards being a nuclear armed power just like the ones sold to small nations in the 60s and 70s. Even Egypt was angling for the bomb back in the day.

India's been making noise about it, but the last I checked they hadn't really done much in the way of building actual reactors.

Seriously? They've built a lot more than the US has over the last 30 years and they've got the accelerated thorium idea heading towards construction.

It's the microcracking due to neutron bombardment while under stress that puts a serious limit on life, since those microcracks eventually grow into real cracks. Just making the vessel wall thicker doesn't do the job. Ripping bits out and welding new ones in does.
So a lot of decades until the repair costs exceed the worth of the thing, not just decades of sitting idle and pulling in the money.

With existing stuff, never, but with new stuff that's never been tried everything is going to work perfectly and payback time will be swift.
The banks don't believe that either which is why the only entities that put up the cash are governments. So nuclear is built due to a perceived National need for GigaWatts that don't have to come from coal or oil (eg. Japan worried about a blockade and maybe Jordan for the same reason) and not for economic reasons at all.
So good economic performance is gravy if it happens but it's not the reason to build one of these things.

No matter how good your energy source is you don't want to rely on it 100% is case something it depends on has problems. I've run into that with inland coal fired power due to a lack of rain - plenty of coal, but not much cooling water. The answer was a long pipeline to a dam near the coast that was hijacked by farmers with strong political connections before it was even finished.
So without going into the viability of whatever the Russians are selling or that generation of nuclear in general it's a bad idea to "put all eggs in one basket".

Being a cheap bastard I get that last 10% out with some hot water and add it to mince+tomato dishes that lack that deep artificial red colour that most of us are convinced that cooked tomato is supposed to be.