DANGER FROM EHV LINES

To transmit energy over long distances, it is advantageous to use as high a voltage as practicable: It results in lower transmission losses, less use of material resources (thinner cables), and even the environmental impact of the line is smaller, since it results in a narrower right-of-way than it would for the same power transmitted at a lower voltage.

It therefore follows as inevitably as night follows day that extra-high voltage (EHV) lines have drawn the boiling wrath of the very people who preach conservation of energy, resources and the environment. Attacks on EHV lines can now be read in the Saturday Review ("It is time to question an industry that pursues the quality of life at the expense of public health") and other trashy journals written and read by the semi-literate who desperately yearn to count as intellectuals.

To document the alleged dangers to public health from EHV lines, the utility baiters use such damning evidence as the lighting up of fluorescent strip lights without wires attached to them. If they opened up one of these lights they would find that there are no wires inside where the light comes from, either; and if they spent about $1 for a neon probe at the nearest hardware store, they would find that it lights up to indicate a live wire in their low-voltage (110 V) wired penthouses when they touch the other end of the probe with their idle fingers. These lamps contain gases that emit light when ionized (in the case of a fluorescent light, the emitted light is ultraviolet, which is then changed to visible light by the coating on the glass). And what is needed to ionize them is not an electric current that flows through wires, but an electric field that arises in space between two points at different electric potentials, just as there is a gravitational field between two points at different elevations. Place a nickel between floor and ceiling, and it will fall down to the floor if it can; place a strip light between a transmission line and ground, and it will light up. The latter phenomenon may perhaps frighten the savages in the jungles of darkest Africa; it certainly frightens the American intellectualoids who consider scientific truths uncouth because they are unwilling (and probably unable) to understand them.

Do strong electric fields alternating at 60 Hz (reversals per second) really present a health hazard? First of all, let it be said that where human bodies and biological effects are concerned, no responsible scientist will ever make absolute statements precluding any effect whatsoever. (It has, after all, never been conclusively proven that strong electric fields do not make Paraguayan parrots itch under the left wing.) On the other hand, any Sternglassian publicity hunter can make trivial, false, misleading, or even true, statements on EHV lines and be assured of publicity by the mass media in direct proportion both to the alarm his allegation will cause and to the damage it will inflict on the image of a profit-making corporation, particularly a utility. Here, as elsewhere, the struggle between science and superstition is a very uneven one.

Millions are, in any case, being spent in all advanced industrialized countries to search for any possible health effects of EHV lines; nothing significant has been found in man (and very little in mice and other small animals when subjected to mammoth fields). Meticulous examinations and record keeping of linesmen (who inspect and maintain these lines) and workers in substations and switchyards have revealed nothing statistically significant in the US, Canada or several West-European countries. Neither has anything significant been found in broadly based and prolonged epidemiological studies comparing families living within 75 yards of EHV lines and comparable families living elsewhere. The effort expended in finding such effects, though so far fruitless, is truly amazing, as will be seen on consulting the two references below. The conclusion (quoted from Kornberg's paper) is

[More: "Concern overhead" by H. A. Kornberg, EPRI Journal, June/July 1977; "Regulating possible health effects from AC transmission line electromagnetic fields" by W. R. Rish and N. G. Morgan, Proc. IEEE, Oct. 1979]