Children evacuated from the Fukushima region take potassium iodide to prevent thyroid cancer after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011.
Image: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
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The World Health Organization this morning released a relatively reassuring report suggesting few health impacts from the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. But the accident is likely to cause small, but significant, increases in cancers in populations in a few hotspots exposed to higher radioactive doses.
These conclusions regarding the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986 could be less comforting than they sound: In fact, Japan dodged a bullet thanks to the weather. The pattern of prevailing winds during the accident meant that most of the radioactive materials released from the plant were blown out to sea. The results therefore say little about the health risks of any future nuclear accidents.
"Had the winds been less favorable, the consequences could have been more serious than Chernobyl," says Keith Baverstock, a radiobiologist at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio.
The WHO's assessment last year of the doses of radiation received by the population in the area provided the basis for the health-risk estimates in today's report.
The report, drafted by a panel of international experts in radiation risks and public health, concluded that there was no additional cancer risk for the population in most of Japan — even most parts of Fukushima Prefecture — or in neighboring countries. But the risks were slightly increased in hotspots such as Iitate village and Namie town, which were contaminated by plumes of fallout to the northwest of the plant.
In such hotspots the WHO panel estimated that the fallout has increased the risks of most cancers in children by only a few percent — though for thyroid cancer in young girls the increased risk was put at 70%. These figures are relative risks, however, and the absolute risks are less alarming. For thyroid cancer the baseline lifetime rate in women is 0.75%, so the risk in hotspots would be increased by 0.50%.
"Given the projected very low frequency, 3.2 per 10,000, of radiation-associated thyroid cancer among young people, it is unlikely that any excess would be detectable by the usual epidemiologic approaches," says Roy Shore, head of research at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, and a co-author of the WHO report. Most emergency workers were estimated to have minimal increased risks but around one-third had a small but significant increase in cancer risks.
Experts will probably argue intensely over the report during the coming weeks and months. Although many say the report is well done, the exercise largely depended on modeling of radiation doses rather than on direct measurements of population exposures, and the data were often sub-optimal.
"One of the major problems for those of us interested in estimating the public-health consequences of the accident has been the paucity of reliable data," says Baverstock. "That problem still persists. If the WHO data are not better than we have been able to obtain, then the resultant estimates will be of limited value."
Geraldine Thomas, a radiation-health expert at Imperial College London, argues that the report's cancer risks are likely be overestimates, as its authors openly erred on the side of caution in various assumptions. "Very few members of the population will have been exposed to any more than a lifetime dose equivalent to a single whole-body CT scan," she says.
Greenpeace on the other hand claims that the report is flawed. “The WHO report shamelessly downplays the impact of early radioactive releases from the Fukushima disaster on people inside the 20 km evacuation zone who were not able to leave the area quickly,” says Rianne Teule, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace International.
But the apparently limited health effects of the accident may have been largely a fluke, Baverstock says. "The health consequences of this accident are smaller than Chernobyl because of the very favorable wind direction, out over the Pacific ocean, and the fact that there are no near neighbors," he says. Tokyo, he adds, is less than 200 km away. "Had the winds prevailed in that direction, Fukushima would have been a whole different story."
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20 Comments
Add CommentI remember seeing graphics of the spread of the radioactive plume on the news when this was happening. Indeed, if the wind had been coming from the north or northeast, Tokyo would have been heavily contaminated, and right in the middle of all the earthquake / tsunami relief efforts too. Or if the wind was coming from the south, the plume would have spread over the areas heavily damaged by the tsunami as well. Japan dodged a bullet indeed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore disinformation from Sault, trying to prove he is an opponent of scientific accuracy and truthfulness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissafetyfirst.nei.org/public-health/experts-say-health-effects-of-fukushima-accident-should-be-very-minor/
Even the workers RIGHT INSIDE THE PLANT did not receive harmful doses of radiation. The entire Fukushima site outside of some internal areas of reactors 1-4, and a very few external areas had radiation levels that were moderate to low. Something a prudent individual would avoid over a long time period, but certainly not urgent. And most of that radiation was depleted after a couple weeks. So Sault's wild Greenpeace tainted imagination presumes that some crazy tornado like wind lifted the radioisotopes right upwards from the Fukushima site and carried it off to sea.
"..Gale presented preliminary data on the 10,000 inhabitants near the Fukushima plant thought to have received the highest doses of radiation showing that:
5,800 received doses less than 1 millisievert (mSv).
4,100 received doses between 1 and 10 mSv.
71 received doses between 10 mSv and 20 mSv.
2 received doses between 20 mSv and 23 mSv.
By comparison, each year a resident of the United States receives an average total dose from background radiation of about 3.1 mSv.
Gale said it was important to translate these doses into something the general public could easily understand. These radiation doses indicate an “incredibly small” increase in risk of death from cancer of only 0.001 percent for a member of the Japanese public, he said. The increased risk of cancer incidence would be only 0.002 percent for a member of the Japanese public.
Such a small increase in the cancer rate would make it very hard to scientifically verify an increase in cancers that could be directly linked to the Fukushima accident.
“The exposures to the population are very, very low,” said John Boice, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and President Nominee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. “As such, there is no opportunity to conduct epidemiological studies that have any chance of detecting excess [cancer] risk. The doses are just too low."
Keep up the great work. Only by constantly shining the light of facts & reson on the false & outright dishonest claims of the anti nuclear brigade, will they be consigned to the darkness from whence they come. In truth, many of them yearn for a nuclear catastrophe to bolster their argument. Constantly inflating casualty figures. How frustrating for them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is a shame that nuclear reactors were designed to produce weapons instead of safety.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou still aren't considering the uptake of radioactive isotopes by the human body that cause a much larger cumulative radiation dose along with being highly toxic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd I don't see what exactly is your disagreement with what I said. If the wind was blowing from another direction, wouldn't areas in the path of the plume see more contamination?
Nope, the total absorbed dosage is what was determined for the residents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually there was a large concentration of Cs-137 due to a prevailing Westerly wind, which shows up clearly on the radiation maps. But of course the radiation levels are always max right at the fukushima site and declines away from the site. So even at the maximum area, just outside the plants, the level is modest, something to avoid for a long period of time, but nothing frightening.
This i what SA should write aboutThorium Liquid Reactor LFTR
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan't Melt Down, Fuel can't burn
Can't be diverted for Bombs
Extremely simple, no heavy redundancy,
Small size
Very cheap to produce
Virtually all the fuel is burned instead of 1% in current reactors
Can be used to eliminate existing radioactive material
Thorium very cheap and very abundant
byproducts produced needed for medical and NASA explorers produced etc
No additional mining needed
Thorium co-located with rare earths currently preventing mining those elements
Solves green house gas issues
$30K Thorium = 1/2 billion in electricity = less than 3 cents KWH
Thorium enrichment not needed
Thorium reactors work at ambient pressure i.e, no explosions
Technology proven with working reactor in 1960s
Thorium reactors waste has a 1/2 life of 300 years not 10,000
Brief overview from 17 out of 32 presentations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk&list=PL098D071EE5755361
Great presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecoci4vEbzo
Interesting web site about Thorium Energy
http://energyfromthorium.com/#ResourceCenter
We have the solution but the coal and oil and existing reactor industries will fight it.
We are falling behind cause China and India are going full blast on this technology
Congress is setting on its ass while the world moves forward. The US could build these in less than 10 years for the cost of one aircraft carrier
All of your claims really only apply in theory. A commercial LFTR has yet to be built or operated for any length of time, so we have no idea if any of those benefits will work in practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will agree, LFTRs are promising, so we should funnel all the money we currently waste on building traditional reactors and use it to get a few demonstration reactors up and running to see how well they operate in the real world. It will take at least 10 - 20 years to get these reactors up and running however, so we should deploy as much energy efficiency and renewables as possible in the mean time so we can maximize our emissions reductions. If LFTRs don't turn out as great as promised, we can just continue to install efficiency and renewables until we have this whole pollution / fuel depletion / climate change problem solved. By the 2020's or 2030's, renewable energy might be so cheap that LFTRs might even just play a small part, but I don't know if that'll actually happen any more than you know that LFTRs will be the silver bullet for all our energy problems.
You really have a rudimentary understanding of Nuclear tech. LFTR is just one of many versions of MSRs, which have already been successfully built, with a $3M/yr budget in 3 yrs. There is nothing magical about LFTR, similar achievements can be made with Fast Reactors as India is doing or Uranium MSRs, such as the Denatured Uranium Molten Salt Reactor (DMSR) which David Leblanc is advocating. And there are many other game changing GenIV reactor designs that could well be highly successful, including Pebble Bed (PBMR), High Temperature Gas Reactor(HTGR), Accelerator Driven Subcritical reactors (ADS) such as the GemStar, which Carlo Rubbia at CERN is advocating. And, of course, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) or GE PRISM, the Liquid Chloride Fast Reactor (LCFR), Fission-Fusion hybrids such as the Helion Energy & Sandia's Inzinerator, and various metal cooled Small Modular Reactors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust the one example, which I particularly like, the simple-minded DMSR could be built and operating within 3 yrs, if a couple $billion was spent on it (the Wind, Solar, Coal, Oil & Gas industries consider a couple $billion to be coffee money).
Perfect for Mining Camps, remote Communities, Bitumen Process Energy, Hydrogen production, Distributed CHP and District Heating.
The DMSR uses 1/6th the Uranium of an American type LWR or 1/4 that of the CANDU. And is a prelude to the LFTR which uses 1 tonne of thorium to generate a GW of electricity for a year. 1.4 gms of thorium/yr to supply the avg households electricity.
Inherently safe, meltdown proof (the fuel is already molten), they can't overheat, they are self-regulating, no control rods, and if they ever did over-temp a frozen plug would melt and the core would be dumped into a holding tank, they did that every weekend at ONRL - dumped the core. They run at atmospheric pressure - you don't need a giant containment building. You likely will bury them underground. High temp, very efficient, air cooling is practical. They are small & compact.
DMSR, An Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come:
energyfromthorium.com/forum/download/file.php?id=728&sid=5a94910cc159198f9adc52d69955e817
youtube.com/watch?v=_-BXg18fAIk&feature=relmfu
China, with a meager $350M in funding, expect to have a 2 MWe LFTR operational by 2020. More$ = faster results.
Here again, when the "N-word" is mentioned Sault suddenly becomes more fiscally conservative than Rand Paul, but elsewhere he constantly harps about how catastrophic Global Warming is and how super-urgent money-no-object funding is. Talk about hypocrisy or what.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany are questioning the completeness and accuracy of the WHO report when factoring in the following:
1. No records of initial radiation exposure were kept, measured or monitored.
2. Radiation exposure of workers is incompletely measured and monitored.
Read the article from the Asahi Shimbun entitled:
"TEPCO fails to submit dose data on 21,000 Fukushima plant workers" which describes how shoddily radiation monitoring records are being kept on plant workers.
3. Google and read the article entitled, "Toxic link: the WHO and the IAEAA 50-year-old agreement with the IAEA has effectively gagged the WHO from telling the truth about the health risks of radiation"
4. Consider what eating, drinking, breathing, and bathing in a contaminated radiological environment will do to the human body as the days and years wear on.
5. Consider the Teratogenic effects of radiation, and DNA damage which Plutonium can cause for several generations.
6. Enenews (dot) com has a good library of past articles/reports on illnesses/deaths being reported under the wire in Japan.
And if we are to follow the money: The WHO works in conjunction with the pro-nuclear IAEA; the IAEA is funded by the pro-nuclear DOE.
Lastly, there will be a Fukushima Symposium held on March 11th and 12th.
I expect this Symposium will be a great opportunity to learn real data.
For more information on the Symposium and to listen in Live, please go to www (dot) helencaldicott (dot) com
1. Wrong. They all wore radiation dosimeters and the dosage was well below anything dangerous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. Woopedy f'in do. Radiation dosage measurement was at least 100X greater accuracy than the measurement of carcinogens that ALL citizens were exposed to, including asbestos, benzene, PAHs, Furans, PCBs, Dioxins, Heavy Metals: Lead, Antimony, Cadmium, Arsenic, particulates, biotoxins/pathogens, and others. Greenpeace is adamant that ONLY nuclear reactor emissions should be examined. Anything else must be ignored. Now why do you, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club insistent that the much higher radiation emissions from Shale Gas be ignored?
3. Sounds like more Greenpeace Bull. These are scientific reports that show all their data, unlike your Greenpeace specials that declare we are right "because we say so".
4. Yep, nothing. People live in areas with 100x the radiation levels of Fukushima and have a lower incidence of any type of radiation induced illness than the avg population. Why is it you Greenpeacers could care less about the much more dangerous levels of Asbestos, PAHs, PCBs, Furans, Dioxins, Lead, Arsenic etc released by all the building collapses, Oil & Gas fires, and debris burning bonfires?
5. Consider the teratogenic effects of all the above chemicals released by all your Oil & Gas fires, asbestos released, plastics burning releasing Dioxins, PCBs, polychlorinated-dibenzo-furans some of the most deadly substances known to man.
6. More Greenpeace bull. Greenpeace has refused to acknowledge that their position declares many thousands die every year from radiation due to aircraft travel and thousands more due to radiation released by gas emissions.
QUALIFIED Radiation Health Physics experts on the potential effects of Fukushima:
"..Fukushima radiation level is comparable to high natural background areas; UNSCEAR
-- Radiation protection standard in 1920s was a safe tolerance dose: 680 mSv/year
-- Radiation-induced DNA damage rate due to 1 mSv/year is more than 6 million times lower than spontaneous DNA damage rate
-- negligible in comparison with natural rate
-- Radiation-induced: 10-100 DNA alterations per cell/cGy
1 mSv/year radiation < 3 x 10-2 DNA alteration/cell/day
This is > 6 million times lower than spontaneous rate!!!
So radiation is not a significant cause of cancer.
We’ve known this for more than 20 years!.."
TESTIMONY OF John D. Boice, Sc.D.:
"..Fortunately, the health consequences from the radiation releases from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant appear to be minimal.."
Greenpeacers cry when they hear that.
BTW, your Big Oil stooge, Helen Caldicott, got ripped to shreds and her entire agenda basically proven to be worth less than a piece of butt-wipe by the Rational Environmentalist George Monbiot here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/
Hey, Guestposting how about sharing with us the source of Helen Caldicott's funding? What's a matter - cat got your tongue, something to hide?
Please read my post before hurling personal insults. Please link to the information that shows "...MSRs, which have already been successfully built,..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know about the IFR and a few small research reactors already built, but none of them were even demonstration scale nor is there a commercial fuel supply chain up and running. You do know that "MSRs" shift the technical risk from the reactor to the fuel cycle, right?
Anyway, people can come up with all the plans they want, but to say something has already been successfully built is kind of a stretch...and depends on your definition of "success" I guess...
Sault: "...Please read my post before hurling personal insults.."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again, accusing others of doing what you do yourself more frequently and more severely. Unlike you, myself and others rarely complain about it.
Sault: "..that "MSRs" shift the technical risk from the reactor to the fuel cycle.."
I don't get you. Technical risk? MSRs have much lower, total risks, especially of the most severe types of accidents that involve large radioisotope release, than even GenIII LWRs, and they have a very low risk. That is what counts.
As for your MSR not being successful, from Wikipedia:
"..The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was an experimental molten-salt nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researching this technology through the 1960s; constructed by 1964, it went critical in 1965 and was operated until 1969.
The MSRE was a 7.4 MWth test reactor simulating the neutronic "kernel" of a type of inherently safe epithermal thorium breeder reactor called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. It primarily used two fuels: first uranium-235 and later uranium-233. The last, 233UF4 was the result of breeding from thorium in other reactors. Since this was an engineering test, the large, expensive breeding blanket of thorium salt was omitted in favor of neutron measurements.."
"..
Hours critical: 17,655
Circulating fuel loop hours: 21,788.."
"..The ARE was a 2.5 MWth nuclear reactor experiment designed to attain a high power density for use as an engine in a nuclear-powered bomber. The project included several reactor experiments including high temperature reactor and engine tests collectively called the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiments: HTRE-1, HTRE-2, and HTRE-3 at the National Reactor Test Station (now Idaho National Laboratory) as well as an experimental high-temperature molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - the ARE. The ARE used molten fluoride salt NaF-ZrF4-UF4 (53-41-6 mol%) as fuel.. operated for 100 MW-hours over nine days in 1954.."
The above A.R.E. is a VERY DIFFICULT special application.
So they have been successfully been built from scratch within 3 yrs, operated for several years at an R&D cost of < $100M $2010. A trivial amount.
It ain't rocket science, the concept is proven, just spend the bucks, build a commercial prototype, as well as a dozen other types, all for the cost of Wind Power$ thrown down the sewer in one year. Meanwhile continue to build safe, proven LWRs ASAP which will produce start-up fuel for these other reactors. Especially small modular LWRs.
Will you quit talking trash about proven energy sources like wind without posting any proof to back your claims up?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou must not do a lot of engineering or project management...Technical Risk is the uncertainty concerning the performance of immature technologies and their integration with existing or other immature technologies. The MSRE was 7.4MW THERMAL or probably 2.5MWe NET...about 1/400th of the output of one of the reactors going up at the Vogtle site in Georgia. You have to realize that this is a HUGE difference. Scaling up a $100M reactor to that level would put a commercial-scale MSRE at $40B! At the rate that the cost keeps growing at the Vogtle site, you would have to move down the learning curve by 75% just to keep up with these expensive reactors! Just like biofuels seemed appealing initially, but when they're scaled up, their shortcomings became apparent.
Not saying this will necessarily happen, but having one of these reactors scaled-up to 50 - 100MWe AND figuring out how the fuel cycle will work in a commercial setting would go a long way towards demonstrating the viability of the technology while lowering the technical risk of scaling up to the 1GWe level. Your own source said the breeding blanket was expensive, right? And the experiment also found these problems:
"Operation of the MSRE provided insights into the problem of tritium in a molten-salt reactor. It was observed that about 6–10% of the calculated 54 Ci/day (2.0 TBq) production diffused out of the fuel system into the containment cell atmosphere and another 6–10% reached the air through the heat removal system.
One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium - a fission product generated in the fuel."
Let's stop wasting money on LWRs and and use it instead to find out if breeder reactors can live up to the hype.
Would you quit talking trash about proven energy sources like molten salt reactors? Your Wind has only proven it is an intermittent, mostly useless energy source that has failed to deliver ANYTHING of value in Ontario, Colorado, Texas, Ireland and Holland where utility scale analysis of its effectiveness has been completed. I've posted those analysis many times you know damn well I have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou couldn't have EVER done any engineering or tech projects since you hype up every little tech problem as though they were a deal-breaker. I've NEVER done a large project without running into these difficulties, which there is always solutions. The major question is, just one example, the MSR, how the economics will compare to the dozens of other types of reactors that can be built. That they can be built and operated commercially is obvious - it ain't rocket science dude - use some common sense.
And Biofuels never did make any sense on either a small or large scale, and many have said so including myself, so you're wrong about it being some mysterious scaling problem that occured after they were first built. Nothing whatsoever to do with Nuclear - but much more to do with Wind & Solar - since they both have similar land usage and local environment dependency issues.
And calculating a cost from an R&D program, extending it to a commercial scale build, is so stupid you would have to be brain-dead to even make that calculation.
And there is no reason that MSRs need be scaled up to 1 GWe they can be factory produced as SMRs. And once again you claim scale economies ONLY apply to Wind & Solar. Nuclear is not entitled to that. Show us the cost of your Wind & Solar if built one at a time - no factory or assembly line production.
LWRs ARE NOT a waste of money. That is a stupid statement. They are our cheapest source of low carbon electricity available at the moment. Even FOAK GenIII in the West is at least 30% cheaper than Wind and 1/3rd the cost of your Solar. Even if you were so dishonest (and you are) as to compare an intermittent, weather dependent power source to a reliable, 24/7 one. I've shown you this many times with hard data and as usual you just ignore the facts, and pretend no one ever showed you the truth. More of that intellectual dishonesty of yours.
You still don't get the point...and why you would not know the definition of technical risk and claim to have managed projects before seems iffy, but we'll be here all day if I get that nit-picky.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, you want to introduce EVEN MORE unknowns by making these things on an "assembly line". Add in even MORE technical risk to your plan since NOBODY has made nuclear reactors like this before. And since these breeder reactors were developed in the 50's and 60's, a lot of the expertise and technical information concerning their fabrication and operation has been lost. You see, it's not like NASA could just build another Saturn V rocket to go back to the moon, so why do you think we can just pick up where the MSRE left off? AND THEN you want to scale it up even 100-fold! MORE. TECHNICAL. RISK.
Look, I'm not saying this is impossible, but I get really tired of breeder boosters like you saying these reactors can solve all our problems when you have NO IDEA how technically and financially risky / difficult it will be to actually achieve your goals. And the riskier they are, the LONGER it will take to iron out these issues and get these reactors up and running. I'd be surprised if we have more than 1GW of breeder reactors running by 2040.
Regardless of whatever fossil fuel propaganda you've posted concerning the supposed shortcomings of renewable energy, costs are coming down and performance is coming up on wind / solar / etc. Germany is doing just fine and is moving towards increasing penetration of clean energy with gusto (or is it geist?) Lets see how far we can take efficiency, grid flexibility, and renewables out to 2040, and if breeder reactors are ready to take off by then, we'll have this whole climate change / pollution / fuel depletion thing licked. If breeder reactors don't pan out, lets just keep moving forward with the PROVEN approaches of efficiency, grid flexibility and renewable energy and finally kick the fossil fuel habit sometime in the latter half of the 21st Century.
You don't have the remotest idea of what you are talking about. And they ain't breeder reactors, they are generally high burn reactors, breeder reactors are ones like India is successfully building to produce fuel for their PHWRs. According to you ALL reactors are Breeder reactors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd many types have been built, have operated successfully, and are operating right now. So don't talk nonsense about something you have Zero knowledge. Any investment risk is so trivial as to be not worth mentioning when you consider the scale of the Energy/Global Warming dilemna. Do you have even the remotest idea about Peak Oil - the Energy Cliff - EROEI - etc? If you did, you sure wouldn't be spouting trivial nonsense about "possible technical risk".
It is just utterly unbelievable how you preach about Global Warming like it is the immenent end-of-the-world but the proven best solution we have you worry about a few $billion in possible investment risk, while your Wind power has been a 100% proven total loss in many if not most areas. And Solar is a guaranteed >60% investment loss because it costs that much more than better alternatives.
You are being ridiculous. A total lack of intellectual honesty.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore nuclear propaganda by the nuclear pushers.
Your comments are inaccurate and outdated.
Even back in 2011 it was reported that some Fukushima workers received high doses. And collectively their dose rate today is high.
Nuclear energy is dead. Get over it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no safe dose of radiation.