Mobile phone masts near Nursery

[onlytheone]

Anyone else concerned about the proximity of a mobile phone mast to their home, school or nursery? Always been at the back of mind as a worry but article in Sunday Times yesterday has triggered my anxiety again. We have one extremely close to my child's nursery school and I am feeling uneasy about this. She is settled so I don't want to pull her out on a whim! The plus is that she is not there full time.

I don't have a mobile. Am I allowed to not want a mast near my nursery or home?

Can I contribute?
I am an engineer who (used to) design mobile phone towers (RF engineer).

DCs explanation is correct - about radiation dropping of significantly with distance.

WHO issues guidelines on the max amount of power that towers are able to emit. THe operators that I work for normally design for much less than WHO guidelines (around 100 times less).

I would not be overly concerned about a tower near DSs nursery (apart from aesthetics!), but I will not allow him to use a mobile phone for more than a minute or so at a time.

And Franny, of course you are allowed to not want one.

In fact, councils need people to protest - otherwise we will be overrun with phone towers. Telcos don't limit themselves just to be nice - they do it because they have to...

I think we will inevitably end up with a correlation between phone towers and bad health.
They will get put into areas where people can protest less and where there are property owners who don't care about upsetting their neighbours.
Those are typically poorer, who average poorer health.

Agree with DC about the likely future correlations but also geographical clusters of disease are an absolute bugger to identify, before you even begin to go into possible causation. The Texas Sharpshooter approach (define the target area after the shots have been fired and declare each one a bullseye) happens a lot and is pretty flawed science.

There is a genuine problem where the government is both promoter and regulator of an industry. Agriculture gets away with pollution and defective food handling that would get anyone else shut down or in jail. The same issue applies to radio antennae, as spectrum sales are a significant source of revenue. It made 25 billion that's billion not million.
To put that into context it was equivalent to about the entire amount paid by companies in corporation tax that year.
That's why digital TV is being shoved down our throats, because they want to sell the TV frequencies.
Thus the number of antennae is only going to go up. Advances in technology are unlikely to reduce this since most radio is line of sight, because it is basically just a form of light, so you need lots if you are to have blanket coverage.
I find myself caught between my deep scepticism of any health effect from masts, and an equal mistrust of the government when it does "deals" with the companies it is supposed to regulate.

I like this article from Ben Goldacre:

"Meanwhile I have nothing to declare but my cheekiness, and if I was very worried about the mobile phone network being a danger to health ? which could well turn out to be the case - the first thing I would do is campaign to make my own mobile phone operator erect their mast as close to my house as possible.

Pay attention. The one thing that people who worry about the health risks of mobile phone masts tend to forget is the inverse square law: the power of the signal falls away extremely rapidly as you move away from the mast, much faster than you?d think, exponentially in fact, because the energy is dissipated and spread out in 3 dimensions like a big, ever-growing sphere. A bit like how the skin of a balloon gets thinner, the more you inflate it.

Meanwhile you?re holding a dirty great big transmitter right up next to your brain in the form of your mobile phone. In fact, because of the inverse square law, the phone gives you a far higher dose of evil rays than the mast. Go on, press it harder, I can?t quite hear you. But mobile phones, very cleverly, preserve their battery life by transmitting a much weaker signal into the air (and therefore also your head) when they detect that a mast is very close by. If you have a phone, it?s in your interest to have it transmit at the lowest power it can manage, which means a strong signal from the mast, which means the mast is on your street. I don?t expect you all to start campaigning at once."

Yes, Blue I would be prepared to give up using my mobile and I have not yet replaced it after it was damaged 14 days ago! I do not use it much anyway.

My environmental science lecturer was on about this the other day, he was saying that amounts of microwave radiation frying our brains from holding the phone to our ears has been much reduced by the masts springing up everywhere ie. if they don't work as hard to send signals, they don't emit nearly as much harmful radiation IYSWIM.

I think it's always the things that you don't worry about that blow up into big situations. The odd fag, big mac and phone mast might not hurt us....it may be the giant killer ants that live under your bed!