Underwater power cables make lobsters larvae bad swimmers | Hacker News Reader

Underwater power cables make lobsters larvae bad swimmers

hw.ac.uk

> “One potential solution is to bury the cables in the seafloor. This is already done for many marine renewable developments but can be expensive and difficult to maintain. It will be important to ensure its continued inclusion in the consenting process for future projects.

That's a great way to make renewable projects more expensive and thus less likely to happen, the effects of which may be worse (even for those crabs) than a couple cables in specific locations.

OTOH, it shows that electromagnetic fields, even static (DC) ones, can have significant biological impacts. Was this already known or is that a new discovery that could have impact beyond protecting crabs?

>OTOH, it shows that electromagnetic fields, even static (DC) ones, can have significant biological impacts. Was this already known or is that a new discovery that could have impact beyond protecting crabs?

There have been concerns about high voltage power lines for as long as I can remember. There's been NIMBY activism regarding them for awhile. So I guess it depends on what you mean by "a new discovery". The problem is that the people complaining about the EMFs from power lines get lumped together with people saying cell phones are mutating human DNA.

I know that people have been complaining, I'm wondering if there is any scientific backing for those complaints.

very little right now, this study is a pebble needed in the mountain of evidence required. Maybe in 2055 our scientific tools will be more advanced/sensitive to measure this stuff.

That tech is here. Protein folding is sensitive to much lower than ionizing frequencies.

Source?

Interested as well

This came up several times on HN and I've been curious about it ever since, esp the opinion of researchers.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21457072

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Blank+M&cauthor_id=214...

https://www.physiology.columbia.edu/MartinBlank.html

This professor, now retired, did a number of papers on this theory claiming to find evidence of sensitivity.

You know I actually talked to someone talking about cell phone radiation?

But like hardcore. I actually listened. Super consistent and scientific about it, was getting radar-blocking paint designed for stealth fighters delivered to her in her beautiful house so she could paint the outside of her house with it. That's hardcore. All the science checked out, except for the conclusions of medical cancer trials, which proved her wrong.

My conclusion is their suffering was real, but it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly because many of my ancestors worked with electricity, signals, et cetera. So it stood to reason it wouldn't affect me. I still think it won't.

But the frequencies keep getting higher. Now 5G is like 6GHz...and you know something nobody actually liked the cell phone tower near my house growing up, it was considered a necessary evil, like a dumpster. Nobody truly bought into the media science about it being wholesome and harmless, you never wanted to get close to it at a visceral level. Everybody had that dread of it, they just didn't talk about it.

Microwave starts at 1GHz, and microwave ovens which we all know are dangerous (don't argue, it's too prevalent in the culture that they're dangerous, the South Park time they all left the microwave door open deliberately just in order to get cancer) interfere with 2.4GHz wifi (same frequency). (I turned wifi off and did what this person said to do to connect to the internet, ethernet, as I wrote this). So wifi is the same kind of radiation as a microwave, just less of it. But a mutation can be caused by a single photon in the right place at the right time. Like protein folding, that is so so so sensitive we have no idea how sensitive that is.

And now they want to do 5G so we can all stream our personal Netflixes on our phones all the time? More bandwidth requires higher frequency, 5G is I think 6GHz. More energy for more signal too if you want 4K video, more photons at higher energies. There's tons of opposition.

I didn't recall that person that well, didn't really believe her or care about her.

You know you totally pulled a 180 on my attitude on cell phones with your scorn.

EDIT: what forums are you talking about that talk about this stuff about the cell phones? You have a link to the paranoid conspiracy theory blog? Just so I can see for myself how stupid that woman was, so I can laugh with you.

Most of the points you have there are far detached from material reality. I sincerely hope you remedy your knowledge and your mindset.

Argue with a single one of them. Quote me on something I said that is wrong.

> So wifi is the same kind of radiation as a microwave, just less of it. But a mutation can be caused by a single photon in the right place at the right time. Like protein folding, that is so so so sensitive we have no idea how sensitive that is.

If you're worried about single photons causing cancer, you must live in a cave deep underground. The electromagnetic radiation that a WiFi antenna puts out is nowhere near the power of a microwave, and even still, microwave radiation doesn't put out photons. And it's true, at a high enough power, it will can cause damage, by cooking you. Not by inducing cancer. In the 60s, experiments were done where mice and other small rodents would be frozen in a non-destructive way and subsequently reheated using a microwave. If I recall correctly, the rodents in question never experienced any complications and lived enough to fulfill their average life expectancy. Further, the energy involved when using microwaves for communications are just orders of magnitude smaller and dispersed over a far larger area than what is used for heating food. Similar to how one can use large loudspeakers to disperse relatively low amounts mechanical energy over large distances in a safe manner, but if one was to build a small box with a large moving membrane and use about a 100x more energy to move it back and forth, it would almost certainly be lethal to put your head in the box. But the lethality of this pressure chamber does not imply the lethality of all speakers in existence, even if they rely on the same physical phenomena for their operation. The same goes for using microwaves for different purposes.

There are no other points in your comment, just a disjoint narrative around your and a 3rd party's experience.

microwave radiation doesn't put out photons.

Stopped reading right there. That's exactly what it does.

Cell towers near the house a great, because your phone radiates less RF power when you use it right next to your head... and also uses a lot less battery.

It's all a matter of spectral density. Frequency is meaningless. The lightbulb over your head is currently irradiating you at a rate something like 100 times more energy than your cell phone. Yes microwaves are dangerous at high power. But the inverse square law means that anyone not literally holding their head up against a 5G tower transmitter is not going to be affected in any way.

This isn't really right, frequency definitely matters. The same energy content of a sievert of ionizing radiation in visible light wouldn't damage you nearly as much.

You know what’s higher frequency than 5G? Sunlight

Thank you, yes, that's exactly right. And it is in fact harmful, if you are shipwrecked and getting beaten by the sun 14 hours a day, exactly all day, you'll remember this comment in this forum. It is in fact harmful. UVA and UVB, gives people cancer, Fitsch type 1 people die of that all the time, it's brutal. There are OTHER frequencies that are visible that are not harmful in everyday quantities, and that's specifically because we evolved to block them with our skin. But if it's from a laser? Not ionizing, but it will blind you.

UVA and UVB are higher frequencies than visible light. Radio waves are lower frequencies and the power is strictly regulated. I am yet to see any valid mechanism by which radio waves can be harmful (other than causing burn of power is not regulated)

other hogwash aside , the most interesting thing you mentioned was a civilian being able to buy 'radar-blocking paint designed for stealth fighters'.

I'd love that (probably ficticious) contact; EM blocking paints would be mega useful in a home RF lab -- all the ones I know of are super toxic, unfortunately i'm sure the military ones are even more-so.

Probably paint from the late 70's, still military grade, just not the cutting edge. And chemistry doesn't work that way, there are some environmentally sound compounds that come up, sound enough not to poison her beatiful garden, and she wasn't the only RF hater in the entire planet, like you think it's just her sockpuppeting in those forums? But it's not like I was the second, I plain don't care about RF, total immunity from natural selection. So I only care about pain she felt and still feels.[1] For me it's putting myself in her place, if she complains that's noble, it's noble to complain because then others can reason about their own pain with a better sense, better words, when the complaint is true, and say, I feel that same pain. Something is wrong.

She had access because of her conviction to her crusade, because she was smart, knew all about the spectrum, like I said it all checked out medical studies notwithstanding. Actually answered the question of tin-foil hats, said they're harmful because they end up acting as like as an analog to a parabolic antenna to focus the RF into the center of the skull irregularly, with hot spots.

If it is hogwash, I want to hear all about it! Answer point by point, for instance by arguing whether it is wise to hack a microwave so it cooks with the door open, with you in front. I'd love to hear your experimental results.

But to interpret "your" comment in the best possible light, per the site's guidelines, and something I did want to get around to because I like that question. No I think you actually could find stealth fighter paint for a mega useful use in your home RF lab, if you were as tenacious as she was. And as rich, and as smart, and as connected, and with a community of people like you, and had as persistent a microwave migraine, I mean if you actually needed to. She didn't hate all radio, no problem with DC or daylight, mostly certain specific parts in between, especially...from the way she told it...she objected to VHF (30MHz roughly) til infrared, and then UVB and UVA, and from ultraviolet on out she hated all of it. She hated it with perfect hatred, she called them her enemies.

It had a psychosomatic component but it wasn't purely psychosomatic, and you must understand headaches are never purely non-psychosomatic.

So what's your budget for your RF lab, $100? You do have a home RF lab, don't you?

[1] And then maybe she'll sympathize with my hatred of the F atom in the water and toothpaste. I fight for her, she fights for me.

I'm a bit puzzled by the methodology. I didn't notice any mention in the paper if the exposed EMF was meant to be similar to a surface-laid cable, or one that is buried.

In any case, it is certainly the case that subsea power cables for offshore wind farms are buried (up to meters deep) or otherwise overlaid by rock or other materials to protect them from damage, scour, anchor strikes, etc.

I'm not sure how they could possibly control against confounding chemical explanations, either. Surely high voltage lines warm the nearby water, which undoubtedly leads to chemical changes that could affect small larvae.

They must have had a control tank with the wire in, but no current in it.

Of course aquarium heaters are a familiar feature everywhere, undoubtedly there too, with temperature held constant.

The control for heating would have to be a wire with a much higher resistance and thus smaller current but same heat dissipation.

There is a book, "The Body Electric", by Robert Becker, about his investigations of electromagnetic effects on, mostly, salamanders.

During the time he worked, and for long after, such investigation was effectively forbidden in the US, on threat of losing grants and invitation to present at conferences. Becker had a free pass based on a relationship with the US Veterans Administration, which hoped he would be able to find a way to regenerate severed limbs, a topic of some interest.

The mode of action he found was orchestration of development and growth by way of sub-nanosecond electric currents. He was able to control healing and regeneration -- turn it off and on -- by applying these small currents in different directions.

AC fields, from 60Hz up into microwaves, can be persuaded to induce such currents by modulation. So, with no or with one modulation, exposure may have no effect, but with another you get a pronounced effect. You cannot generalize from one exposure to another, one modulation to another. The effect observed in this study might easily not be replicated in another, according to some apparently trivial variation in their setup.

*"sub-nanoampere electric currents"

This is an interesting lab setup, but...

Are underwater cables ever not paired? HVDC are always coaxial, so... No field.

Edit: paired but not always coaxial, so it's possible to get a small field.

I strongly doubt they are paired. A single conductor with earth return works as well, at half the cost.

Earth return is really what we should be banning. It causes small amounts of metal corrosion across areas hundreds of miles wide, destroying other infrastructure like bridges. It probably also is bad for the environment, but evidence for that is weak so far.

I have not heard of this. It seems ... unlikely. If you have a reference you would like to pass along, you might change minds about this.

”Chronic exposure to 2.8 mT EMF throughout embryonic development resulted in significant differences in stage-specific egg volume and resulted in stage I lobster and zoea I crab larvae exhibiting decreased carapace height, total length, and maximum eye diameter.”

2.8mT at 1 meter requires 14,000 amps of current, which is far beyond most under seas cables (except the largest).

So suffice to say any lobsters more than 1-2m away will be just fine.

I remember some other study in which crabs were actually EM sensitive and were attracted to power cables underwater.

If this also holds for lobsters it could be a similar phenomenon with lobster larvae or the lobster adults settling to reproduce a few centimetres away from the cables because they are attracted to the EM field.

Far beyond most undersea cables, and even then the article is concerned not with the largest long-distance high-voltage/high-current transmission lines, but with individual wind turbines.

Power loss scales with the square of current (P=I^2 x R), and copper is already expensive, so they typically use step-up transformers to reduce the current in a wind farm to something on the order of a hundred amps.

I've pushed 40,000 amps for a distance of a couple hundred millimeters, using some giant water-cooled electrodes for a resistance welding application...but there's zero reason to have 14 kA as a distribution line in a wind farm, that's absurd.

Yes, some lobster and crab larvae will probably also exhibit decreased carapace height if they're squished by the wire as it is fed out onto the sea floor...but that's about the same distance as the region in which they'll be affected by magnetic currents.

It's OK, eventually their shells will dissolve in the sea water^Wcarbonic acid and it won't matter anyway.

We certainly have to also consider the damage from not laying the cable as well. As ocean acidification from climate change is killing lobsters, the cable might be the lesser of two evils

That's what I was saying. But I'm sure we'll find a lot of people suddenly very emotionally invested in lobsters living within 10m of power lines, just like there are people who have a sudden overwhelming love for birds near wind turbines, but conveniently don't really rate other birds being killed by windows, cats, fossil fuel emissions, vehicles, farming, habitat destruction, etc.

And I'm sure if you looked, you wouldn't find any of them happen to be astroturfing for fossil energy companies (not saying this study necessarily is, but it'll be gleefully seized on forever after by those who are).

> suddenly very emotionally invested in lobsters

Maybe for the 1%, for everyone else it is emotional labor. Unlike turbine-chum, lobsters are delicious.

http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

There is always nuclear which don't kill birds, don't put their emissions into the air, don't destroy the habitat for animals, and in general has proven to be fairly safe for animals even in the case of catastrophic accidents.

Wind power need to consider endangered birds. Hydro power need to consider migrating fish (many which are currently on the brink of extinction), and now offshore wind need to consider the impact on animals living in the ocean. And we still need to solve the issue of storage for countries depending primarily on a combination of fossil fuels and wind and is located too far north to survive on solar during low wind conditions. We can't just sweep the problems under the rug and present it as the perfect solution without any issues.

Crustaceans are not negatively impacted by adicification.

This recent literature review[1] disagrees:

> Our global literature review and synthesis of OA [Ocean Acidification] thresholds for decapod crustaceans reveals that this group is sensitive to OA across multiple pathways, ranging from physiological and behavioral responses to mortality.

But I'm not a marine biologist, and I'm open to new information.

(Also temperature rises is a threat to lobsters, but at least they can just keep moving North[2] for the time being, there are more lines of latitude to go).

[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.6511...

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/lobsters-move-north-as-ocean...

> Crustaceans are not negatively impacted by acidification.

Anything with an outer skeleton made of Calcium carbonate will die in a high acidic environment, or will be eaten that is the same

What's the mechanism?

Cherry picking data and bias in setting up an unrealistic, unphysical experiment. There is no mechanism.

I'm betting you wrote that without even reading the paper.

At least they used a few big words

It's pretty easy to establish a potential mechanism for this so I'm not sure why you would throw this result out without further investigation.

Plenty of animals have a sense for the earth's magnetism and this is well documented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception

Putting cables carrying strong electric currents which in turn generate magnetic fields around those cables would be almost sure to have some effect, the question then becomes how much of an effect rather than whether or not such an effect is possible.

The mechanism could be epigenetic signaling. Recently scientists have been able to control and influence cell-differentiation via long-lifetime electric fields. (Although the electric potential was created chemically via ion pumps rather than externally).

Still they showed pretty crazy results like being able to create a worm with heads on both ends.

It's looks like this kind of electrical signaling is likely the primary mechanism by which your cells know what to become and in which direction to grow.

A super interesting paper that I'm surprised isn't more famous: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523124219.h...

The design of the experiment makes me wonder a few questions. One is why to study the impact of submarine cables that lie at, lets say 1000 m deep?, over larvae that live a 2m deep. Eggs, yes, could have an effect, but Zoea I that would be kept in pelagic cages? they don't share the same space.

If I remember correctly (I could be wrong), The lobsters in the article had not settled for the bottom yet.

I assume also that there will be a tank influence. That explains why crabs perform better, as expected. Lobster larvae are incredibly delicate to cavitation, or impact with aquarium walls or bubbles. When they molt is a huge problem to keep them without deformations.

The article doesn't say, but the paper abstract says this is from an unchanging DC magnetic field, which is somewhat surprising, as it, unlike an AC field, does not generate electric current within the animal's body.

Meanwhile people in the UK who live near electric pylons are at an increased risk of developing cancer.

Issues like this and micro-plastics in our bloodstreams will be causing so many issues in our lifetimes. Future generations (if there are any) will be appalled that we used to be so unaware of the impact of our own existence.

It's akin to people relieving themselves in their own water supply.

I’m more concerned about “clean cooling “ solutions, which basically heat up rivers and oceans

most of the actual clean cooling solutions have retention ponds that are man made to use for cooling.

At least in the US, the EPA regulates water that is returned to rivers and streams, including temperature.

Not to say the heat isn't radiated back into the atmosphere from those retention ponds, but that heat has to go somewhere. Better than the alternatives though.

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