Transmission lines are pretty harmless when considering things that could be built instead. Zero emissions, silent, no illumination, etc.
Mostly silent. High voltage transmission lines may have a low-frequency hum. You have to stand directly under them to hear it though.
Also, transmission towers are usually the best lightning rods for miles in a given location, and it is fucking unsettling to live close to them during storms. Not to mention they are an eye sore.
as for them causing leukemia i'd not consider that realistic
Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.
Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.
The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.
Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.
The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.
These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.
We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.
People with neurodiverse conditions are not sensitive to power lines. Hard to believe we’re seeing this type of claim on Hacker News.
Modern high voltage DC transmission lines also don’t have 60Hz emissions because they’re DC.
Anyway, the land where these transmission lines are built usually isn’t running through high population density areas. They’re not slapping a HV transmission line right in the middle of a residential corridor if they can avoid it. It’s going through farm land and empty space if at all possible. It’s a hundred times easier to build the towers in those locations instead of near population centers.
I remember the original issue with these is they were spraying some kind agent orange like chemical to keep growth down under the lines and people were getting cancer from it 50 years ago.
The nature of the easement can make a big difference. Oftentimes the power lines will be colocated with gas pipelines which tend to impose stricter requirements on land owners. It's a lot easier to do things like excavate when you can see what you aren't supposed to hit.
The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all.
This seems like the thing where people use the phrase "there is no evidence of" to imply that something has been disproven when what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other.
I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia.
I’m fully aware though that before we knew about nuclear radiation people would have had similar thoughts about some random rare earth metal causing cancer if you’re not even touching it. So point is, I’ll wait for the proof before I’m convinced, or attempt to convince others.
I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars. I might be speaking from personal experience.
Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food.
> I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly engage in very well known risky behaviour like eating big macs or driving cars.
Eating junk food has the countervailing benefit that they like the taste. There is very little personal benefit to having a high voltage line in your yard, and people respond especially poorly to things that have a personal risk with no personal benefit.
The actual change to look at isn't really the heating, but rather that RF has been known to increase glucose metabolism in affected cells. My own theory is that if that is true, you're essentially increasing cell aging and oxidative stress with the increased metabolism. Who knows if it's true. The effect seems small and the exposures need to be longterm.
(I personally doubt there is a significant risk, but if there is, these powerline easements would be quite risky to the residents in terms of ongoing/continuous exposure.)
At 60 hz? I think that’s a bit low for microwaving.
To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the leukemia claim just as likely.
If there is a cancer risk then good evidence either way would require randomized controlled trials, which for long-term exposure are very expensive and take a long time, so then nobody does them and nobody really knows the answer. This is not the same thing as knowing it to be false.
The crackling of HV-lines was used as a sound-effect in that game. 'Realistically'. Using that buzz and crackle from reality, only slightly ampflified.
Transmission lines emit EMF which seem pretty harmless unless you're a pollinator or migratory bird. Maybe the home owners are just making a fuss so they can get a better payout to improve the amenities in the bunkers that comprise their subterranean community of concrete beneath the barren badlands of the over-world. At the very least, they should ensure respirators and gaussmeters for able-bodied coal miner minors.
Debatable. Some studies found this:
https://emfradar.com/articles/power-lines-childhood-leukemia
Then some other studies mostly invalidated that.