DEATH BY ELECTRIC CLOCKS

Killer electromagnetic fields ride high again. This is in part due, to the cellular telephone panic [AtE Mar 93], which has made a number of companies come out with "screening" the radiation of VDT terminals; they screen off the radiation together with all ill effects from gremlins, tooth-fairies, and Ninja turtles. These snake oil merchants are probably well aware that when electromagnetic waves do have any health effect, it is frequency dependent; for example, there is no fundamental difference between AM radio waves and gamma radiation except frequency, which is like saying there is no difference between Portuguese and Swahili except in language. The frequency of the radiation used for cellular telephones is roughly 1,000 times higher than that of the magnetic field deflecting the electron beam in a VDT terminal and that is itself roughly 1,000 times higher than the 60 Hz of the electric power in transmission lines.

The second reason why the killer magnetic fields are riding high again is the utility wimps who cater to the Greens, and who, against the better judgment of their engineering departments, are making plans to bury their transmission lines, now on high steel towers, underground. Underground lines at up to 500 kilovolts are extremely costly, as you may well imagine, but burying them won't do a thing by itself, for the earth is non-magnetic and all you would do is bring the unchanged magnetic field much nearer to the consumer. To suppress the magnetic field, you have to surround the lines with a highly magnetic material (meaning one that deflects the magnetic field into itself with very little penetrating to the earth surrounding it), such as mu-metal. Such magnetic materials have been widely used in tiny transformer cores by fractions of an ounce; to use them by the ton (how about our dear planet's resources?) will raise the price even higher, which does not interest the utility wimps excessively, for it is you, the rate payer, who will foot the bill. The leaders, as usual are Southern California Edison (SOCAL), the superwimps who (together with the superwimps of Edison Electric Institute, the PR arm of the electric utilities) were the first to kowtow to the Greens and jealously guard their leading position of servility.

By even making plans, let alone executing them, they will hand the Green activists and their lawyers a strong case: if there were no danger, they will claim, the utilities wouldn't do it, and they are liable for all cases of child leukemia, and maybe athlete's foot, before they did it. I hope Socal will have to pay a crippling penalty after such a suit, and the fact that they will be totally innocent of the charge itself will only increase my glee. They are asking for it, as the simple phrase goes; for English has no simple phrase for superwimps beseeching the Greens on their knees to punish them.

The simple fact is that the best study yet made of the subject (the Savitz study [AtE Mar 91]), did not find any conclusive results linking magnetic fields of power lines to child leukemia. I wrote a booklet Electromagnetic Fields and VDT-itis on the subject at the time, available for $3 from us. In it I pointed out that the strongest magnetic fields (whose danger I do not concede) do not come from anything as ridiculous as an electric clock (which professional panic monger Paul Brodeur of the New Yorker claims can give you cancer), but from being inside a loop of electric current, such as is formed when the mains in your own house are badly grounded and the return current flows along the water pipe through your neighbor's house back into the net.