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Comment by mrhappyunhappy | Hacker News Reader

There is an idle plant near San Diego they've been wanting to open for a long time but the residents in surrounding areas fight it tooth and nail. For a changebof scenery, residents in Nagasaki are fighting an ongoing battle (losing but trying) to shut down the plant in the area. I have yet to hear of other cases but so far it seems people living in the vicinity of nuclear plants are not happy.

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Ok, so what you are saying is that you would prefer to live next to a dirty coal power plant that is much more likely to cause you to get cancer or other horrible health effects?

I would say that's a false equivalency because coal operators (until recently) were profitable enterprises whereas nuclear lobbyists are generally concerned not just with public tolerance but public funding.

Coal is/was only profitable because externalities are not priced in.

Everyone knows the externalities of nuclear power and it gets priced in to any discussion of new plants in 2019. The fear (about meltdowns) and concern (about waste) typically outsizes the actual risk substantially.

But most people don't seem to realize that coal far more produces aerosolized radioactive waste, other carcinogens, and as a result, cancer, per watt, than nuclear. Even if you assume every single nuclear plant melts down. Burnt coal is just absymal for public health, but it doesn't get the scary branding that nuclear power does.

It’s at the southern tip of Orange County, not that far from both San Diego and Los Angeles, and there are millions of people nearby. It has been closed for about 7 years, and the claimed risks/fears seem plausible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...

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