My experience is that it works well in general, but some landowners are better than others, and some highway authorities (which enforce the laws) are more zealous than others. Most of the issues I see around me is farmers allowing crops to grow through low use footpaths such that they become impassable.

The other tricky bit of PRoWs is that any path used by the public for 20 years continuously, without force, secrecy, or the landowner's permission, is legally presumed to be a public right of way, even if it isn't shown on the definitive map kept by the local authority. That can lead to legal fights e.g. [1] and [2]. There are also 'permissive footpaths' where landowners have agreed to allow the public to pass, but not become a PRoW. There are also s106 agreements (planning obligations) where developers must allow the public to use land as a footpath. The Thames Path has a mix of these.

In Scotland, there is a more general 'right to roam' which allows anybody to access most land (excepting buildings and their curtilages, military sites, and other obvious exceptions), but there are affirmative duties to maintain PRoWs that don't apply to open access land making them still relevant. England and Wales have some limited open access land as well, but much much less of it. NI has no open access land and (subjectively) fewer public footpaths.

[1] https://www.ramblers.org.uk/news/ramblers-win-court-appeal-1... [2] https://www.ube.ac.uk/whats-happening/articles/pippa-middlet...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0900/ML090080661.pdf

[2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0816/ML081690374.pdf

Also, they're basically inadmissible in court [49 U.S.C.§1154(b)] so are useless for determining financial liability.

It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.

RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!

If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.

The national labs are organized under the Office of Science (17 labs), NNSA (LANL, LLNL, Sandia), the Office of Nuclear Energy (INL), the Office of Environmental Management (Savannah River), Office of Fossil Energy (NETL), and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (NREL). Some offices are doing better than others re: funding in the current environment!

I get that it's meant to be overly simplified, and it's a neat idea that is probably helpful for communicating some key concepts.

They’re tend do be more physical than “arbitrarily xenon-poisoned” but represent a variety of extreme and nominal states to form an operating envelope, and then healthy margins are applied on top of that.

Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.

If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]

If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.

That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...

Here's a sample of the referenced "Linconshire Poacher": https://priyom.org/media/247818/e3.mp3