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Ring of fire: the five non-Japan nuclear sites in quake zone

Responsible for 90 percent of the world's earthquakes, the "ring of fire" stretches from Australia to Russia around to Alaska and America's West Coast and down to Chile in South America. Here are the five non-Japanese plants in the world's most active earthquake zone.

5. Richland, Wash.

Steve Ringman/AP/File
This photo taken Nov. 15, 2010, shows one of Hanford's 'tank farms,' where some of the site's 53 million gallons of nuclear waste is stored below ground in giant, aging steel-and-concrete tanks, in Richland, Wash.

  • By Mary Helen Miller Correspondent

Richland, Wash., is the home to the only nuclear reactor in the state – Columbia (WNP-2). The reactor is located on the Hanford site, which was built in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project. The reactors at the site created the plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. Nine other nuclear reactors on the site have been decommissioned. The reactor has more backup systems than Japan's Fukushima Daiichi and was built to handle a magnitude 6.9 earthquake, the maximum quake projected to hit the area. But scientists are finding new faults in the region that could generate bigger earthquakes.

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