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Electrical Shielding for the Homeowner?
AugstWest asks: "As more research comes out showing that high voltage electricity sources can cause cancer and other health problems, I was wondering what the geeks among us could come up with for electrical shielding ideas. I've got a high-voltage transformer just off my backyard to power the train that also runs practically through my backyard, and it would be nice if I could somehow shield us from it. Of course, if the shield could also be an induction coil to sap power for my house, that wouldn't suck either..."
As more research comes out showing that high voltage electricity sources can cause cancer and other health problems.
Okay I RTFA because I thought this had been effectively pooh-poohed and was interested in seeing additional research. But TFA is from 1996!!?? and the poster has the audacity to claim this as more research!!?? Cliff, what were you smoking in you posted this? The other FA is concerned about breathing ions. Oh my gosh, I salted my beans at lunch and ingested ions!!
This is really a new low for slashdot.
And survey your living spaces. When my daughter was a couple years old and the powerline/childhood leukemia thing hit the news, I did just that. I relocated the main feeder cable from my meter to my breaker box to get the field down to zero in her room. I was able to do it by just pulling some giant staples out of the cable and moving it without disturbing connections. YMMV, hire an electrician for anything more invasive.
As to the stuff not on your property, I'll bet that it's still undetectable thanks to the inverse square law.
In any case, if it's bothering you, the first thing to do is rent the meter and do a survey.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Cliff, I've often thought that you are one of the best Slashdot editors. But this article should not have appeared on Slashdot.
Slashdot often carries pseudo-science articles, especially recently. Slashdot editors need to be more careful about that. If you didn't listen in Physics class in college, talk to someone who did.
Personally, I believe that there are a lot more things a lot more ruinous to your health than a couple of humming wires stung out in your backyard. However, saying that, we'll move on.
Ok, so you have a power line to supply trains running along the back of your house. Exactly how hot is it? 25kV? 66kV? Check the insulators - anything longer than a foot (or so) is high voltage, anything less is likely 3.3kV or below.
If you don't have a field strengh meter, get an average 36W fluoro, go out to your backyard barefoot at night and hold one end. Wave it around a bit - if there's any serious amount of power around, it will light up the closer you get to the lines. Check how much it drops off between the back of your backyard and your house.
Field strength drops off with the square of distance, so unless you're directly under 300kV lines, you probably have more pressing things to worry about, like that clock radio near your head when you sleep. Or the electric blanket that's millimeters away from you. Or the colour TV (or monitor) that is basically a particle accelerator.
If the wires are an appreciable height above your roofline, and you are still concerned, earth out your roof (properly, with a ground stake,etc). This will shield the bulk of your house. Personally, as mentioned before, I'd go worry about other things, such as the resistant bacteria thats cropping up, or the apparent dwindling oil supply, or whether N. Korea gets The Bomb.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I just read John Stossel's [liberals-are-cringing] book "Give Me A Break!" and it has some actual facts concerning personal risks, something quite lacking in the media, and that also appears to be a problem the poster and editor appear to have. So here, off the top of my head, are just a few of many suggestions, any one of which will have a well-documented, much better chance of both improving one's health and lengthening one's life:
1. Fasten seat belts always when in a moving car.
2. Don't drive under the influence of alcohol or mind-altering drugs.
3. Quit smoking
4. Stay upwind of smokers
5. Eat less fat and less meat, eat more fruits and veggies, especially raw ones.
6. Do some aerobic exercise (swim/bike/run/jog/walk/skate) several times per week.
7. Trade the VW Beetle (or other bad-in-a-crash car) for a Volvo (or other good-safety-record-for-its-driver vehicle).
8. Don't drive when drunk/drugged drivers are most likely to be driving.
Okay, I'm sure there are 492 other things that many people commonly do that have a proven, more detrimental effect on life and health ELF fields/living next to high-voltage power lines that people were so worried about in the 1980's and 1990's (the real danger to living near such lines is if one falls and hits the ground - you could be electrocuted by walking away from it! Hop (keep your feet together!) away, don't walk). Even if it's "scientifically proven" (or even a very strong statistical correlation shown) that cancer rates are higher near 60Hz high voltage (electrostatic fields) or high current (generating strong magnetic fields) lines, there are so many other things that we KNOW are MORE risky that any cost-benefit analysis would dictate that it's better to spend thousands of times more money on these other things before you even LOOK at whether ELF radiation kills 0.0001 person per million per year, or if it's even as much as 0.01 person per million per year.
Slashdot's new look looks serious. And especially with responses like this (ELF is NOT news, and it's NOT Stuff That Matters), I'll have to come up with a more serious tagline.
Tag lost or not installed.
7. Trade the VW Beetle (or other bad-in-a-crash car) for a Volvo (or other good-safety-record-for-its-driver vehicle).
Ok, where exactly did you here that the Beetle is bad in a crash? Since when is Four stars considered "bad"?
If I remember the specific 20/20 it was back before the new Beetle came out, years ago. So he is saying the old VW Beetle, the one with the air cooled engine in the rear.
Rather than trying to shield an entire house, just build yourself a set of Orgone accumulators for every member of the family and spend as much time in them as possible.
The thin metal walls are sure to do as good a job attenuating 60 Hz EMF as they do re-radiating orgone energy.
You also might want to consider placing them in the left hand middle section of you home and painting them green so as to get as much Feng Shui benefit as you can while you're at it.
Seriously, there are a lot of very real environmental hazards to worry about, but this isn't one of them. So far, decades of research have turned up no reliable evidence for risk associated with low level, low frequency electromagnetic fields, and no one can come up with an even slightly plausible mechanism by which they could damage the body.
By all means, worry about what you're breathing, and the chemicals in your food and water. (And if you want to worry about things which are orders of magnitude more likely to do you in, consider how you get to work, your diet, and exercise regimen.) Don't worry about environmental EMF exposure.
I suggest you start with the World Health Organisation.
Find either a physics or radio guy and ask them to explain about the inverse square law. Unless the transformer is underneath your house you need not worry.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
High-voltage stuff does have significant fields - though any effect on humans is far, far from proven. The flourescent light trick is cool (and scary to some), but means little. The whole worries over power lines seemed to spring originally from the reporting over Love Canal. Most people don't understand electricity, and the idea of an unseen field flowing through their body is unnerving to them (irregardless of the facts).
Most of the studies of power-lines have trouble accounting for the fact that housing prices right next to HV powerlines are noticably lower - originally mostly for esthetic and sound reasons, now also due to fear of the unknown. In addition to causing different demographics of buyers, there are other related issues. For example, when planning powerlines, they don't just draw a line across a map - they try to minimize the cost of buying the land. Guess what? Brownfields are cheaper, and industrial area have less people objecting than "virgin" suburban land. And once the lines are in, businesses are more likely to be willing to set up shop under/near HV power lines - esthetics isn't as important to them, price is. Businesses (especially in already-low-value areas) tend to be the ones most likely to release toxins (you don't often see that in farmland). Untangling all this is really tough.
This causes a difference in demographics that's hard to account for. And even so, the demographics don't scream "cause".
More to the point, the original commentor was correct - this question is at best misleading and at worst promotes yet more bad science thinking by assuming facts not in evidence. I wonder how many readers won't notice TFA is from 1996, or won't even read it and assume the poster is correct about "increasing evidence".
Didn't the sat thing come down to 'you're free to recieve the signal, but breaking the encryption is illegal?'
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