Cellular Phones:
Mast Hazard or Luddite Scaremongering?

Here is the political issue: if there really is a health hazard from mobile phone masts, then politicians should do something about it. If there isn't, we still have to address the fears of some of those we represent. Should we act as if there really is a danger, just because there might be one, however improbable? Some say so and call it the "precautionary principle". The downsides of that approach are twofold:

1. we should have to put the brakes on anything new as soon as anyone suggested there might be a hazard;
2. there are usually risks - different ones - from stopping or restricting a development, if only that the benefits of the development have to be foregone.

I know enough about the electromagnetic spectrum and biology (my degree was in biochemistry) to be entirely happy about cellphone technology. Here's my argument.

• Walk down any street and you will see people with mobile telephones clamped to their ears. The distance from aerial to head is a few millimetres. If the radiation was going to fry their brains, we should by now have a lot of brain-damaged mobile phone users as evidence of the fact. Where is that evidence?
• Radiation strength falls off sharply with distance: it is called the inverse square law. Double the distance, quarter the field strength; 10 times the distance, 1/100th of the field strength. So, at 8 feet, field strength is 1/10,000th of that at 1 inch.
• The transmitter/receiver masts are bigger than cellphones, so they look as though they must be more powerful. Not so! The field strength needed to get a signal from a hand held mobile phone to a TX mast is the same as that needed to go the other way. The reason the masts have to be big and strong is that they have to stand up to weather. Their power output is of the same order - about the same as a domestic light bulb (100 watts).
• The amount of energy in the playground of a school with a cellphone mast - source of much noisy controversy in the press and other mass media - is not enough to warm the feet of a gnat.

1. microwave ovens have power outputs in the range 650 to 1000 watts;
2. you would have to climb inside one to be damaged by it: you are quite safe in your kitchen.

I said I would deal with the relationship between frequency and energy. This is more complicated, because it relates more to quantized radiation in and around the visible spectrum than to continuous ("coherent") microwave radiation carrying voice and binary data.

• In parts of the microwave region of the spectrum, the wavelengths are such that water molecules, which are highly polarised (they have positive and negative ends) can be shaken around. That is what heating is: "more shaken up" is the same thing as "hot". The molecules themselves are not affected by this: the bonds between the atoms in the molecule are many orders of magnitude stronger than the forces between the molecules. (An order of magnitude means "multiply by ten".) Although many biological molecules are more fragile than water, the same principle holds.
• Microwaves have frequencies much lower than visible light. It is not until the frequency rises above the visible spectrum - into the ultraviolet - that the energy in a photon of radiation is enough to shake up and sometimes to break the bonds between atoms in fragile molecules. It is this effect that causes suntan. At much higher frequencies still, X-rays and gamma radiation can cause serious damage to biological molecules by breaking the bonds between atoms within them. This is a "quantum" effect: simplistically, this means it either happens or it doesn't; there is no half-way house; radiation of lower frequency simply cannot break chemical bonds, no matter how long it irradiates them.

Meanwhile, for any who want a balanced report,
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2001/rp01-111.pdf
is heavy going but authoritative.
http://www.zyra.org.uk/phonmast.htm is a concise iteration of roughly the line I have taken here.
I shall let you do your own googling to find the plethora of scaremongering anecdotes.

As to the planning procedure that we use at West Devon to deal with telecom mast notifications, I have written a separate account here.

I hope that, whether you agree with me or not, you will at least agree that mine is a valid political approach: instead of jumping on the bandwaggon of every scare story, evaluate it and, if you find it unconvincing, try to reassure people by setting the issues into a sensible context.

Does that make sense? Email me if you have a view.