There is a newly-built apartment complex here in Austin that I’ve been looking into. Everything is great, except…it’s right next to a big electrical-power transformation station, with all the machinery. The nearest apartments (right adjacent to the power station) are probably about 180 feet away from the electrical equipment. The furthest apartments are about 800-900 feet away. At what point does the EMF or whatever-other-radiation decay sufficiently to pose no risk? 500 feet?
No one has ever been able to prove that living close to power lines or a substation causes anything harmful at all.
This whole mess started back in the late 60s or thereabouts. Some insurance folks noticed that people who lived next to high voltage power lines didn’t live quite as long as people who didn’t. Since lifespans affect insurance payouts, some insurance folks get paid big bucks to figure stuff like this out as it directly impacts the insurance company’s bottom line.
For a long time, nobody but the insurance folks really gave two hoots. Then, in the 1970s, a study came out that linked power lines to childhood leukemia. This study was later discredited, but the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak. People thought that power lines were bad.
In the 1980s, things really went full-blown whack-a-doodle crazy. Schools and other institutions, fearing lawsuits and such, wanted to know what areas were “safe” and what areas weren’t, and at that time, no one had really done any decent scientific studies into the safety of power lines. So almost overnight, an entire industry was born where folks would walk around with field strength meters and would proclaim what areas were “safe” and what areas were “dangerous”. But how could they decide what a “safe” level was on the meter when no studies had really been done yet? They couldn’t. They pulled meaningless numbers out of their backsides and used those instead.
So all of a sudden, tons and tons of money gets poured into the issue. Sometimes a study would find some sort of link, which would get splashed across the headlines. But then follow-up studies weren’t able to confirm the link. And since “hey, we didn’t actually find anything after all” doesn’t make for attention-grabbing headlines, those studies weren’t so widely publicized. Since the public only saw the attention-grabbing first headlines and not the follow-ups, this gave the general public the incorrect impression that there really was something bad going on.
When all of this started, cell phones were the size of a brick and only certain Miami Vice detectives could afford them. But as time went on, cell phones got smaller and cheaper, and it didn’t take much for folks to make the connection that if power lines are bad, cell phones must be bad too. So now you had “CELL PHONES CAUSE CANCER!!!” headlines all over the place, and again, the follow-up studies that didn’t find a link after all didn’t get much press, if any.
Fast forward a few decades, and now TONS of research has been done. Sure, periodically you’ll find studies that find some sort of link to something bad, but as far as I am aware, none of these studies has ever held up to peer review and follow-up studies. Sometimes a study generates a false positive. That’s just the way science works. That’s why we do follow-up studies and the like.
So as far as we know, there are no health issues whatsoever with living next to a substation or next to high voltage power lines.
That said, folks who live next to those things do tend to live shorter lives, statistically. Why? We don’t have a clue.
One of my college professors was one of the early researchers into this subject. As he said though, it could just be that people who choose to live healthier lifestyles may just choose not to live next to such things.
Magnetic fields around Belgian substations transforming 150 and 36 kV down to 11 kV drop to 0.4 μT at 7–8 m and below 0.1 μT beyond 10 m. So it’s negligible.
DOI 10.1109/TPWRD.2008.2002686
What risks are you concerned about? In any case, here’s The WHO’s EMF project:
Here’s their brochure:
Their first listed key objective is
-provide a coordinated international response to concerns about possible health effects of exposure to EMF
Their response is that they can’t find any health concerns regarding EMF, despite decades of looking, if there are any health concerns, they’re rare.
And here’s the song that got stuck in my head as soon as I read the OP.
The economic angle is, I suspect, a big part of this. People think power lines & substations are an eyesore and are willing to pay more for an equivalent house that’s not near that infrastructure. So people living near power lines are, on average, a little less wealthy and a little less healthy.
Reminds me of this old meme/joke that pops into my head from time to time:
Headline: People who own horses live longer.
Implied Correlation: Horses make you live longer.
Reality: If you can afford a horse, you can probably afford health insurance/medical bills.
Has the OP ever considered the electricity much closer to them inside the walls of where they live now? And inside the walls of every building they’ve ever entered? And outdoors under the streets or hung overhead?
Whole lotta electricity everywhere.
All of those studies is right out of this xkcd, especially the hover text:
Another practical consideration may be, does the substation make any noise? I still have very good hearing, and I can hear barely audible high frequency buzzing from some appliances or old fluorescent lighting. Maybe the substation makes a buzzing sound that is barely noticeable or seems negligible when you are just visiting, but would become maddening if you moved in and heard it constantly. Probably not a worry, but something to consider.
That’s probably what’s going on. (And riding horses significantly increases your risk of death, fyi.) But it’s also true that powerline rights of way are routinely kept clear with large doses of herbicide, and I’ve always wondered if that night pose a risk. Mostly i think about that when hiking. The open area under power lines is often full of brambles with tasty berries, but i wonder if it’s safe to partake.
Yep. But if you Google this topic, you will be blasted with an immeasurable amount of woo and B.S.
A former coworker fell for the B.S. He was convinced some of the electrical appliances in his home were emitting “dangerous” levels of EM waves. He even bought a portable EM meter. When I visited him a couple years ago, he walked around his house while holding the meter, showing me where the “problem areas” are. He said the meter showed the printer was emitting a lot of radiation, so he now keeps it unplugged unless he is printing something.
Twice a day I drive by a house that has a big, tall tower on their property. The tower is close to the house, and their driveway goes under the tower. It’s pretty cool.
I am not sure how to link to Google Street View. But the coordinates are
39.90543848566814, -84.00967542548966
There are a couple aspects.
Public health risks: zero. Assuming you don’t climb the fence. Ample discussion above.
RF nuisance noise/interference potential: moderate. This is less and less of a concern with advancements in electronics & communications infrastructure. You might hear some noise in poorly shielded audio equipment, cordless phones and old AM radios but we use a lot fewer analog devices and fewer again lowband, shortwave kit most suseptible to powerline noise. Us amateur radio operators will probably be unhappy there but most people will never notice a thing. The power company does try to mitigate the worst of the RFI, too.
Power delivery reliabiliy: PLUS. All things equal, a closer power line run is more reliable. A big station will get big resources to get back online in case if an outage. I’ve heard it said that my own home’s proximity to the electrical mass transit here (the Chicago Transit Authority’s El train) helps in keeping local outages down.
Eyesore: perhaps but at least it’s not a 400 unit apartment building next door.
Lightning attraction: ? All things equal, I’d rather lightning crash at someone else’s place.
Could you make a late-night visit and stand nearby. You would hear it then if it’s there.
Thanks, good point. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll go by and hear if it makes the humming nonstop sound.
Serious high voltage lines also make a continuous crackling noise. Probably from Corona discharge - Wikipedia. Probably not an issue if this is just a neighborhood-level station, but if this is a station feeding a big hunk of a city it might well be fed by lines with enough voltage to crackle.
Twenty years ago or so, my epidemiologist ex-wife mentioned that the general belief in her profession — not proven, but broadly assumed as the best working hypothesis — was that electrical infrastructure, being unsightly and undesirable, would typically be preferentially installed in neighborhoods with little money and political strength to push back. And since low income and otherwise marginal households are correlated with poorer health outcomes, the power lines get indirectly correlated with poor health. She said it was a steep uphill climb to try to study this, for hopefully obvious reasons.
By the way, speaking as an actuary, this effect is enormous. It’s not fully understood what causes it. “Lower stress” is probably a major component. But it’s a known correlation and a very strong one.
Heck, if you are close enough you can put up fluorescent tube lighting and have free lighting in your home!
Random anecdote:
Back when I was a teenager, I was a licensed ham radio operator.
One day I didn’t bother turning on the fluorescent desk lamp when I fired up the radio, and I was pretty darned surprised to see the thing light up all by itself fairly strong every time I tapped the Morse code key.
Meanwhile, the radio hummed and the other lights dimmed with each “dit” and “dah”.
And if that did work, it wouldn’t be legal.
I once read about a homeowner who installed coils of copper wire on his property and extracted some electrical power from the overhead lines, and later got charged with electricity theft. (A couple years ago I did some Googling on it and couldn’t find a legit news article, so it might be an urban legend.)