Scary, scary radio waves

When I started cob-logging here a couple months ago I made a stray reference to conflicts I’ve experienced in having been a skeptically oriented person in the environmental activist sphere. A few of you suggested you’d like to hear more about that. I found an example today, one of probably several hundred of this particular phenomenon I’ve seen in the last 20 years or so.

This morning (local time) Las Vegas Review Journal reporter Jennifer Robison had the dubious privilege of covering a hearing held by the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) regarding allowing customers to opt out of having smart meters in their homes and businesses. Smart meters, which are intended to allow finer-grained monitoring of energy use, are controversial in part because they have a reputation of being cheaply built fire hazards installed in a hurry by insufficiently trained utility employees. Some of that reputation may well be deserved. A few fires have been linked to the things, and I’ve seen some electricians complain about improper installation to increased fire hazard.

I don’t really blame people for being upset about that sort of thing, even if the statistical incidence of smart meter fires turns out to be as low as the utilities say it is. I mean, fire’s a real thing. People die from fires every day and they’re frightening.

But that’s not the criticism of the things that gets the air play. Especially among the environmentally concerned folks in Northern California, where the smart meter resistance originated, the main fear that seems to be driving opposition is that some smart meters which communicate with their utilities wirelessly  are bathing us all in deadly electromagnetic radiation.

Never mind that the effect of RF energy of that kind on biological organisms is essentially nil. Smart meters with RF transmitters generally use the 902 MHz and 2.4 GHz bands at powers of less than a watt, and generally only in a few short bursts a day. Other common household items emit frequencies in the same bands, which have been specifically set aside for their use. Like your WiFi setup. And your cordless phone. and your garage door opener, and your Blueteeth. Those appliances routinely expose you to orders of magnitude more RF radiation than a smart meter, in part because you generally don’t spend hours a day with your smart meter pushed up against the side of your head. And at RF levels weaker than those requires to cook you from the inside out like a microwave oven would, the World Health Organization makes the case against RF health effects about as unequivocally as a body like the WHO ever gets:

Human and animal studies examining brain wave patterns, cognition and behaviour after exposure to RF fields, such as those generated by mobile phones, have not identified adverse effects. RF exposures used in these studies were about 1000 times higher than those associated with general public exposure from base stations or wireless networks. No consistent evidence of altered sleep or cardiovascular function has been reported.

They continue:

From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF signals produced by base stations. Since wireless networks produce generally lower RF signals than base stations, no adverse health effects are expected from exposure to them.

Despite the lack of science behind health fears (other than those involving burns and smoke inhalation), utilities in the US are so beset by opposition to smart meters that they’re starting to back off on their “upgrade all the things” policy, offering concerned customers the option of keeping their old analog meters, usually at a cost significant enough to act as a deterrent. That’s what PUCN did today: they decided to let people opt out of their smart meters for a one-time fee around $90 and a monthly charge of a few bucks.

In the meantime the meeting was a public hearing, and so PUCN had to hear the public. And Jennifer Robison did a bit of live-tweeting of the public comment:

Ratepayer testifies that her “death” meter “electrocuted” her and her pets for six days straight. Miraculously, all survived.

— Jennifer Robison (@J_Robison1) November 27, 2012

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