I don't have a reference on this, and there is so much misinformation running around that I can't be sure of anything, but I have heard that the panels to take the electricity to the equipment were all in the basement of the plant and were flooded. Units 5 and 6 also had panels in their basement, but there was an alternate circuit that allowed the cooling equipment to be energized without going through the basement panels, explaining why they haven't experienced so much trouble.

"Wrong connector" doesn't make sense. It would be easy to wire around an incompatible connector. Wrong voltage or wrong frequency would be more plausible, but I haven't heard that explanation.

I wasn't aware that the Calvert Cliffs plant was ever scheduled to be the first new design plant to be built in the US. At one time that label was applied to the South Texas Project, and I believe that the two new reactors at Vogtle are now in the lead. The Vogtle reactors use the Westinghouse AP1000 design, and the latest revision to that design is nearing presentation to the NRC for certification. (An earlier revision has already been certified.) The Calvert Cliffs reactor was an Areva EPR, which is still a ways from having US approval of its design.

At Vogtle there has already been a lot of dirt moved, and parts of the containment are already being delivered to the site.

That most of the French plants were built by the military in an effort to become a nuclear power is, for the most part wrong. A few of the earlier plants were graphite moderated, gas cooled, which were presumably used for Pu production. There was a push in the bureaucracy for more of these to be built for electricity, put the engineers in the power producing group preferred light water reactors, which are much less useful for Pu production. When there was a push to get off of oil fired electric generation, almost all of the plants were light water. Given the British experience with graphite moderated power plants, the French evidently made the right decision.

Someone could have a field day with this data looking for discrepancies between claimed and actual paternity. A gold-mine for the tech savvy blackmailer.

Exactly.

Besides the fact that people who feel their writing is good are more likely to write, somewhere I have read a research study showing that poor students are likely to overrate their mastery of a subject whereas good students are more likely to underrate their ability.

Actually, Iran probably does need nuclear power. Instead of using oil and gas for electricity generation, it can sell them for hard currency. (I don't know the specifics for Iran, but a lot of middle eastern countries still use oil for power generation, which is very uneconomical. Just because they have lots of oil doesn't mean they should burn it for electricity any more than a bank should burn money for electricity.)

What Iran shouldn't need is enrichment technology which, unlike most modern power reactors, can be used to create weapons grade material.

It's been done several times. There is a study called "ExternE" that does the calculation for several methods of electric generation. Nuclear is low, especially if the calculation assumes centrifuge enrichment, although not as low as hydro. Nuclear opponents sometimes like to quote a study by a guy named Storm van Leeuwen who claims otherwise, but from what I can tell it is flawed.

Actually, if you talk to someone in a community that hosts a nuclear plant, the opinion is usually positive. I recently met a newspaper man from Waynesboro, GA, which has two reactors and two more on the way, and he said the plant was the best thing that had happened to the city.

Also, a recent rethink of the safety of the German AVR has also taken some luster off of the PBR concept.

Will there be a web site to track progress on the plant? This may seem like a crazy question, but the first two European "new build" plants, Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3, both have web sites.

I don't have time to search for the exact reference or the numbers, but there was a European study of the total life cycle environmental costs, including CO2 and other pollutants, of various energy technologies. In terms of CO2, hydro was lowest. Nuclear, solar, and wind were roughly the same. (I believe nuclear was computed two ways, once with gaseous diffusion--still used, but being phased out--for enrichment and once with gas centrifuge. Gas centrifuge produced lower CO2 emissions, but neither figure was astoundingly high.) I believe nuclear (and wind and solar) come in at around 6% of coal. The concrete and steel use in a nuclear plant was taken into account in the study, as were emissions from mining. There is also a Swedish environmental report with similar conclusions.

As for what percentage CO2 reduction in US power plant emissions could be expected, that would depend on how much of the new capacity replaced gas, and how much replaced coal. Any (expensive) gas used for base load would be the first candidate for replacement. That would reduce the impact on CO2 because baseload gas fired plants, expecially the combined cycle plants most useful for base load generation produce less (half?) the CO2 per unit of electricity generated of coal plants, though still far more than nuclear plants. Once you cut into coal, which produces about 50% of US electric power, you see some serious CO2 savings.

Two other comments:
The statement was that there would be a 30% reduction in emissions from POWER plants. I think electric power plants only account for about half on US CO2 emissions, so you would only get a 15% or so reduction in overall CO2 emissions.
From your question, I suspect you are being misled by a discredited Dutch study which claims ridiculously high CO2 emissions for both nuclear plant construction and uranium mining.

...just as the current cold winter in North America canNOT be considered as casting douby...

More fundamentally, no one drought can be directly attributed to global warming, just as the current cold winter in NA can be considered as casting doubt on global warming.

Over time, global warming may make droughts such as the one that exacerbated the current AU fire situation more common. During the change, the vegetation left over from the wetter period before global warming will result in some spectacular fires, but it will only be in hindsight that we can say fires were a result of the change.