Annals of radiation: a prophylaxis - excerpt from The Annuals of Radiation

Nutrition Health Review, Spring, 1993 by Paul Brodeur

Though spokesmen for some utilities have irresponsibly attempted to suggest that if worse comes to worse people will just have to endure the risk of being subject to the harmful effects of alternating-current magnetic fields or else forgo the advantages of electric power, there are many relatively inexpensive measures that can be taken now to mitigate the problem.

A simple and often-used procedure is to pull high-current distribution wires close together with spreaders; that can decrease their magnetic-field emissions and reduce exposure, especially in cases where residences are very near wires. Vertical instead of horizontal placement of high-current wires on utility poles can also significantly reduce magnetic-field emissions, provided the current loads in the two circuits are equal.

The use of the Delta-connection system of distribution -- a system in which primary wires are grounded only at substations and are never directly connected to secondary wire-grounds -- can reduce net-current effects and thus magnetic-field emissions. Spun secondary wires -- wires wrapped together -- encourage the current entering a house to return the way it came instead of jumping to the plumbing to which the electrical systems of most houses are grounded, and creating imbalanced currents and strong magnetic fields.

And the use of concrete water mains and polyvinyl-chloride (PVC) water pipes can effectively interrupt the conductive path provided by metal plumbing, and this furnishes another method of keeping imbalanced currents from producing high levels of magnetic-field exposure.

As for substations and high-current wires that are already situated dangerously close to dwellings, they will have to be relocated or rerouted -- or, if necessary, buried -- in a fashion that will prevent hazardous magnetic-field emissions.

Until such preventive measures are taken to protect the public, and until physicians and public-health officials begin acknowledging the power-line hazard and seriously investigate the cancer clusters associated with it, alternating-current magnetic fields given off by substations and high current lines ... will continue to prove that they can result in brain cancer, leukemia, and other malignancies as a matter not of statistical chance but of biological course.