dear kick,
San Onofre was a hotly contested item, when i lived in SoCal over 25 years ago.
Now, let’s go across the nation, to Long Island, NY, for a moment. Look where Brookhaven Lab (which has a ‘smaller CERN’), is located and go north to Shoreham. That is where the nuke plant was supposed to be built.
The difference between San Onofre and Shoreham is that in SoCal, you had highways that could get you away from there. On Long Island, the roads run east and west, and to get OFF Long Island, you had to NYC, then go north across bridges to CT. But that was no good either, because the plant sat on the south shore of Long Island Sound directly acroos from CT.
As a former customer of the power company on Long Island, I did too.
I lived on Long Island when I was a Kid.
You are right, outside of having a Boat, your escape routes are very limited.
My Wife has a Friend whose Husband is a Nuclear Engineer at San Onofre. I’ll have to see is she can get the skinny from her Friend about what happened there.