Can’t pick your neighbors, generally. If the UAE had its druthers it wouldn’t live just across a narrow gulf from Iran, the erratic regional superpower.

Iran is not popular here, but the little countries on the south side of the Gulf don’t make too much noise about it. Iran has 77 million citizens. The UAE has about 1 million. Iran is about 50 times as big as the UAE.

You get the drift. You don’t generally get belligerent with someone way, way bigger than you.

And now I am worried that we may get another drift … of nuclear fallout. Iran is having problems with its first nuclear power plant.

The air here already is crappy. Gritty and polluted. But at least it isn’t radioactive, far as I know.

That could change.

Iran has admitted that it is having problems with its Bushehr nuclear reactor and is shutting it down. The fuel rods are being extracted. None of this is good. Aside maybe from “getting the uranium out of the machine” before it melts down.

When you live over here, you tend not to think a whole lot more about Iran than you do in California. Crazy president, bad government, a constant threat to regional stability. Same as usual. But still a different country, and not one with a land border.

But Iran is close enough here to touch. It hovers above us, on the globe, like a dark cloud.

And if this reactor — built by Russians (who brought us Chernobyl) and run by Iranians — has some trouble, it not only is a few hundred miles away, it’s almost directly upwind from us. The prevailing breeze here comes right down the Gulf, which is how we end up breathing dust originating in Iraq, which is turning into desert.

As soon as I saw the New York Times story on the sickly Iranian reactor, I started looking for where it is located; I never had actually checked, and it didn’t have to be a major problem. The eastern part of Iran is actually east of us, too, and a radioactive could would probably drift on further away from us. The northern part of Iran is up by the Caspian Sea, and a balky reactor up there might not be trouble, either. I had a glimmer of geographic hope.

But, no. Bushehr is up near the border with Iraq, and right on the Gulf (in fact, the heat and humidity of the location makes it hard to maintain the plant), and any fallout from a nuclear accident presumably would drift right over us.

Grand.

Think of Iran as the people with the big old house who don’t really know how to operate all the amenities. When the place catches fire, we’re going to be choking on smoke here across the street.

I’d like to see that reactor shut down safely, and left off. For a bunch of reasons. Meltdown is fairly high on the list.