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Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields
blueworld writes "U.S. Department of Energy researchers have discovered a possible cause for reported illness around high voltage power lines. They found that rats' bodies produced high levels of ozone when exposed to strong electrical fields. Electrically grounded water produced the same result when exposed to the fields. Apparently, the water in our bodies may be responsible for the health risks of high voltage power lines."
Its saying we are being cooked in exactly the same way a microwave oven cooks food. By vibrating the water molecules all over the place thereby generating heat...
Kinda scarey if its true...
Still, the study identifies another potential health risk. So, what are some ways that we can reduce the potential damage? Some sort of sheilding on power lines? Are there any materials that can cheaply stop this type of radiation and it's effects?
A diet high in anti-oxidants is one easy way to at least limit the damage... (Free radicals caused by the decomposition of 03 as it attacks are responsible for much of the damage. Anti-oxidants can help prevent this).
Because there is a specific health risk. The risk near a power line is NOT an URBAN LEGEND
I speak from doing a bunch of research on this problem, after finding out that Electromagnetic radiation was one of the seven possible causes for the cancer that I survived.
The electromagnetic field (EMF) is not harmful IN AND OF ITSELF. In conjunction with how the body works, some people are subject to some of it's effects. To whit: An EMF field will cause already existing cancer cells to grow faster than normal. Of itself, this is not fatal, as you have to have the cells in the body to start with.
Some schools think that the body causes cancer cells to grow all the time. The body's immune system then kills off the bad cells while leaving the good ones alone. In the presence of an EMF field, the body has to work harder, and once it loses the battle, the cancer will grow out of control.
As I found out, the transition out of such a field to the hospital for a week made me feel better, and when I re-entered the field for a while, I felt worse. The best decision that we apparently made for that time was to permanently remove me from the field, though we didn't know it was even there at the time (in hindsite, we recognized the source of the EMF)
I believe I still have a copy of the article at home (I'm at work now). I had to make a special trip to the UCF library to read and copy the article when I first saw a reference to it. I'll look for it this evening.
The danger level is achieving 1 Telsa in the body. Now power lines may not reach that level (the EMF strength is reduced as the square of the distance after all), but things like electrical power meter boxes DO reach that kind of strength for a radius of 2-3 feet, and I was sleeping in such a field (there were 16 boxes on the other side of the wall. Based upon measurements of a single box in our house by the electric company, those boxes may have been producing as much as 25 Telsa at the point of my head, and less down the length of my body. That's thru a stone wall from the other side too.)
If you check out the listed causes of Lymphoma, you will find that EMF fields are listed as one of the 7 possible causes, though further research is tending in another direction.
When one spends 6 months fighting cancer and taking chemo, you do check out the possible causes VERY carefully so as to avoid a repitition.
So soon people forget the Saccharin f
...
7 00.html
This finding immediately triggered the threat of the so-called "Delaney Clause," a congressionally mandated provision that requires the Food and Drug Administration to ban--literally "at the drop of a rat"--any synthetic food chemical shown to cause cancer when ingested by laboratory animals.
Saccharin's reputation was further tarnished, however, in 1981, when the National Toxicology Program, referring again to the Canadian rat study, elected to put saccharin in its "cancer causing" list-- formally declaring it an "anticipated human carcinogen."
There was no scientific basis for such a classification of saccharin as a human cancer hazard.
Taken from: http://www.acsh.org/press/editorials/saccharin051
The pseudo science of it was that the rats were give enough saccharin to make a 55 gallon drum of soda...
On topic, I have an ozone/ion air cleaner and it does a great job doing what I want it to do... keeping the house smelling clean.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
What about those machines where they put your head into a very strong magnetic field?
Apparently people feel very strange while exposed, and many describe feeling "in the presence of god".
Are these machines a health risk?
If ozone is the problem and it is generated by the electric field, then most of the studies done so far are irrelevant because they never measured electric field strengths. This will be rather difficult to study, as the lungs are most susceptible to ozone, and contributions to lung problems from smoking and air pollution will have to be subtracted. Smoking correlates with poverty level, and poverty level and the proximity of major roadways correlate well with each other and with the placement of high-voltage lines. It's going to be a huge statistical mess.
Note that I'm not worried enough to step away from the computer....
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I think you're failing to get the basic point. Our electric supply is 220V or 110V or whatever. High tension cables are 10kV or whatever. Batteries are 1.5V or 3V, not 5A. In almost all electrical circuits, we control the voltage first, and then vary the current by adjusting load. If I'm living under a high-voltage cable, I wouldn't write to the electricity company and say "please reduce your current", because that depends on what consumers are using. But I could say "please reduce your voltage"
No. The ozone production is related to the current generated across a material containing oxygen. You control that current by increasing the resistance. You do that by increasing the distance between the two things that have 10 kV across them. This changes the voltage gradient between the two objects. The current flowing through the wires only affects the magnetic field, not the static field and definitely NOT ozone production, regardless of what other people in this thread might think...
In other words, if you want to prevent ozone production between high tension wires, don't let them get close enough to emit a coronal discharge. Also don't let people get close enough to emit a coronal discharge.
In a very real, physical sense, voltage determines current and not the other way round.
Not in this case - in this case, current (and time, I guess) determines current, because air, like all materials, is nonlinear near its dielectric breakdown point, and so the resistance is dependent upon the current flowing across it, which in turn determines the current flowing across it. In a normal ohmic device, you'd be right, but near dielectric breakdown, it's the current that matters. If the number of electrons moving through the medium is enough to create an ionization path, the resistance drops like a rock.
Air molecules bumping into it and picking up (or dropping) excess charge.
Again, though, it's a voltage gradient issue. How far do you need to go before you can consider "air" neutral? Thus, you can compute an effective "resistance" between those points, and then a current flowing from the balloon. That current is never going to be anywhere near breakdown, and so the resistance will be huge, and the current flow will be virtually nil, and the ozone production will be nothing.
Look, the basic point is that you can't just say "well, 1m away from a capacitor charged to 10 kV, ozone production is 10 ppb/hour." You need to know the spacing of the capacitor and its dielectric breakdown voltage. In other words, you need to know the current across the capacitor. Measuring current dynamically is easy - measuring resistance dynamically is impossible. If the plates had a current going through them of 2A, I can bet that it produced a lethal amount of ozone, as it was arcing the entire time! If it was 2 nA, then that's different, as it's exactly what you'd expect from a negative ion source generator.
Again, same question if they're dealing with rats. Was it arcing TO the rats? That can be a hard thing to tell (although typically the rats would be a bit jumpy
Simple question here: if you have a high voltage source, can you tell if it's sparking by the voltage? No. You CAN tell from the current it's drawing. Since sparking produces drastically more ozone than not, I'd say the current's important.