I'm wondering if anyone in the Coffee Bar can help me...

I've been googling to find out just how safe it is to live in the proximity of one of those little brick-built electricity substations as the house I want to buy is a semi, attached to another semi, the other side of which is next to a brick substation.

I realise that it's not just the high voltage that is of concern but the magnetic field too. There are lots of dire warnings on the web but these seem to be mostly about overhead powerlines or those huge substations with large metal gadgets within a fence, also underground electric cables. I have read a few times that the level of magnetic field is no higher outside the fence surrounding a brick substation than the general background level. I wasn't aware of how much electromagnetictism we're being subjected to every day in our own houses, offices, schools etc - all very alarming!

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear if any of you have anything further to add on this worrying subject. Don't be reluctant to add to my worries but it would be nice to have some reassurance if at all possible! 

MJ
xx

There's no worry to my knowledge.  There's a power box on the wall outside my bedroom; sometimes when I can't get up in the morning I think it MUST be because it's FRYING my brain.  Chill.

Am still a little bit paranoid about mobile phones though.  Should check out the data, but am tooooo lazy.

Yeah, it humms and buzzes sometimes, that's what pisses me off.

Really difficult to show that this particular correlation has any element of causation.  All hearsay.  I'd say might be better to take advantage of the reduced prices, maybe buy yourself some tinfoil hats/braziers with the savings

Oh:
'Mr Wordsworth said he had been told by experts that one in 11 Australian women over 40 would suffer from breast cancer. "We are still within the statistical norm in terms of those Australian averages," he said.'

I presume he's talking about within the company.  So it might reasonably be just down to chance, given how many broadcasting studios there are in the world.

'Andrew Penman, CEO of the Cancer Council of NSW, said there were thousands of cluster cancer cases investigated around the world in the last 30 years, and, with the exception of a few, no common cause for those clusters had been discovered.

He believed it was simply an unlucky throw of the dice.

"I think this is probably a random chance," Dr Penman said.'

Hmm.  There you go, expert puts it down to neither masts nor windows but dice.  Best not to set up near a casino then.

Thanks for all the replies folks. 

A friend who's a retired civil engineer has also explained a lot to me about  electrical and magnetic fields and what he's told me is quite reassuring. I will go and stand near the substation one cold dark night (such as we're having this July!) when demand is highish and listen for irritating hums or buzzes.

For those of you wondering why I don't just buy a different house, this one has just what we need!

I'm wondering what studies there have been into the effects or otherwise of these various things and who sponsors them -and of course the multilayered maintenance bureaucracy these days with utilities.
There are still regular protests about mobile masts-apparently they are every 50 yards in central London these days-and I dont think there are any conclusive studies about microwaves in volume
My latest concern is wireless networking, similarly, which is temptingly handy as a proposition of course.
I think independent research on the interactivity of these things should be ongoing, with a watching brief an essential thing. And with respect to John, I dont trust any government quango alone on these matters,
any more than Americans do after the recent cavortings of their Environment agency.

Ever since the penny dropped (long after watching a programme about the inventor of radar) I haven't been entirely able to shake the suspicion that the adoption of radar for defence purposes had a lot to do with the beginning of global warming. The programme said something about Watson-Watt(?) finding a bar of chocolate in his coat pocket that had melted after standing next to an operating radar dish for several minutes.

I'm hopelessly wooly on these things, so if anybody has more reliable info, please clarify.

I second p.w.'s comment (though I am neither a physicist, an engineer, nor knowledgeable in the field of environmental sciences).  Radar towers just use radio waves anyway, so you might just as easily bring normal broadcasting stations into the picture as well.