in mid-march americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant in Japan and asked: ‘Can it happen here?’ They already know the answer. As the late great environmentalist, David Brower, used to put it, ‘nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults’. Along much of America’s West Coast runs the Ring of Fire, which stretches all around the Pacific plate from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, Alaska, and down the coast to Chile. Some 90 per cent of the world’s earthquakes happen around the Ring.

Apparently acting predictively on Brower’s piece of sarcastic wisdom, the us has deployed four nuclear plants near the Ring of Fire faultlines, including two active ones in my home state of California. In Eureka, forty miles up the road from where I write, there was a boiling-water reactor that was closed in 1976 following an earthquake from a ‘previously unknown fault’ just off the coast. In its place, there are now spent nuclear fuel rods—except one they now cannot find—in ponds, right on the shoreline; nicely situated for a tsunami, such as the one that disabled the relief diesel generators that were designed to pump emergency coolant in the Fukushima plant. Three plates meet at Triple Junction off Cape Mendocino, a few miles north-west of here. We had a 7.1 earthquake in 1992. Moral number one in the nuclear business: eyes wide shut at all times; deny the predictable.

Further south, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. It was planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri fault, part of the Ring of Fire, a few miles from the coast. Further enquiry established that there had been a 7.1 earthquake forty years earlier, offshore from the plant, which was duly completed in 1973. The power company, Pacific Gas & Electric, said it would beef up defences. In their haste, the site managers reversed the new blueprints for earthquake-proofing the two reactors, so the retro-fit was not a total success. Moral number two in the nuclear business, as in any other human enterprise: somewhere along the line people always mess up. San Diablo is supposedly built and retro-fitted to survive a 7.3 quake intact. In 1906, San Francisco was destroyed by a 7.7 quake, which ripped the San Andreas fault for 300 miles, north and south of the city. Back to the first moral, ‘deny the predictable’: Diablo Canyon authorities recently learnt of yet another fault and are now worried about ‘ground liquefaction’ in the event of a big quake. In 2008 there was an attack by a smack of jellyfish (yes, the collective noun is correct), which blocked the cold-water intake; the plant was shut down for a couple of days. At the last count there were four identified faultlines offshore from San Diablo.

Another 150 miles south lies the San Onofre plant, right on the shoreline, with a 2,000-strong labour force. It has been cited as ‘the scariest workplace in America’. I have swum in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there to enjoy the elevated temperatures; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit, a spherical containment of concrete and steel, the smallest wall being an adamantine six feet thick; just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the collapsing Fukushima units. Further illustration of moral number two, ‘messing up’, is to be found in one of San Onofre’s two active units: the mighty engineering and construction firm Bechtel installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel here backwards. The nearest faultline is the Cristianitos, deemed inactive; see moral number one. The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand along Japan’s north-east coast on March 11, as the tsunami from the 9.0 To¯hoku earthquake rolled in. San Onofre is seawater-cooled. Environmentalists do not care for that, so they plan to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California’s main north–south road; immune to jelly-fish attack, but open to other methods of assault. The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures a 67 per cent probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher for Los Angeles, 63 per cent for San Francisco. Up where I live, in the Cascadia subduction zone—where one bit of a plate pushes under another, as happens off north-east Japan—we have a 10 per cent possibility of an 8 or 9 force quake; a Big One is a near certainty fairly soon.

The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, prone to endless leaks and kindred malfunctions; all of them dangerous. Twenty-four of them are the same design—by General Electric—as the Fukushima reactors. Take the Shearon Harris power station in North Carolina, also a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants. It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately ingenious terrorist to breach Shearon Harris’s puny defences and sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and contaminate thousands of square miles of land.

The reactions to Fukushima from the nuclear industry’s shills have been predictable—if still scarcely believable—sallies into cognitive dissonance. Thus Paddy Reagan, professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: ‘We had a doomsday earthquake in a country with 55 nuclear power stations and they all shut down perfectly, although three have had problems since. This was a huge earthquake, and as a test of the resilience and robustness of nuclear plants it seems they have withstood the effects very well.’

Also jumping on the bandwagon are prominent greens like George Monbiot, who has seized the opportunity of one of the worst disasters in the ‘peacetime’ history of nuclear power to announce his endorsement of atomic energy in the Guardian: