Clearinghouse Update
From time to time we update our readers on situations which have been described in our Newsletter. One of those situations has been the controversy about exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from electric power lines, first raised by Irma Jarcho in her "Observations" column in our Fall 1990 issue. Since then Bob Neff has reviewed M. Granger Morgan's Electric and Magnetic Fields from 60 Herz Electric Power in our Winter 1991, and a more recent pamphlet from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the US Department of Energy -- Questions and Answers About EMF -- was listed as a resource in our Fall 1995 issue. More recently, the 8 November 1996 issue of Science and the January 1997 issue of Physics Today report that a National Research Council report commissioned by the Department of Energy in 1993 at congressional request concluded that "ordinary exposure to EMFs" is not responsible for health problems. The NRC panel reviewed more than 500 studies and did its own "meta-analysis" of 12 studies implicating childhood leukemia, finding that the "wire code" associated with a 1.5-fold increase in cancer rates did not correlate with actual fields in homes. This leaves other factors associated with a high "wire code," such as air pollution, to be investigated, along with acknowledged effects of very high doses of EMFs, including "disruption of chemical signaling between cells in cultures, and inhibition of melatonin production and promotion of bone healing in animals."
This is not to signal the end of the "EMFs debate": three panel members, while signing the report, also issued separate statements of dissent; the congressionally-chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement continues to be active; and a report is due in 1998 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (who copublished the aforementioned Questions and Answers About EMF in 1995).
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Infusion Tip #3 of our Winter 1996 issue concerned whether the US should produce future supplies of tritium for thermonuclear weapons with neutrons from an electricity-producing (and also radioactive waste-producing) nuclear reactor or from an electricity-consuming (and therefore also waste-producing) accelerator, which could also be used for research purposes. In an editorial in the 13 September 1996 issue of Science, Harold M. Agnew proposes another alternative: purchase tritium from Canada or Russia (which has a surplus from its dismantled nuclear weapons and could benefit from hard currency income). Agnew is a former director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and former chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Arms Control Disarmament Agency.
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