RF Emissions: Are Smart Meters A Safety Risk

A small but vocal number of consumers in Northern California and Maine claim that smart meters present a health risk due to their radio frequency (RF) emissions.
It’s important to respect the views of people who are concerned with the health effects of new technologies. However, in this case, decades of scientific evidence indicates that the type of RF emissions from smart meters are highly unlikely to affect human health.
RF health effects have been studied extensively for many decades, since US federal agencies are legally required to do so under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. Beyond the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — whose job it is to set RF safety guidelines — many other organizations including the the World Health Organization and the National Research Council have studied RF health effects.
What to make of the evidence?…

The National Consumer Advocacy Commission advises: “There is a cacophony of information on RFs… Learn to employ critical thinking to everything you read and hear on the subject.”

Here are two facts that I find compelling.
First, RF health risks appear to be insignificant, or at least not reproducible. The thousands of studies conducted over decades have found either that RF emissions do not cause a significant risk to human health, or (in cases where a health effect was seen) the effect could not be reproduced by other doctors and scientists attempting to repeat the experiment.

In 1996, a prestigious 16-member committee the National Research Council (an affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences) announced the results of a Congressionally commissioned major study of low-frequency emissions in residential areas. In Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields (a 384-page 1997 book), NRC summarized its analysis of approximately 500 previous studies of low-frequency emissions health effects conducted over 17 years. NRC concluded that exposure to residential emissions does not cause cancer or otherwise threaten human health.

Second (and more to the point of this post): across the US, there are over 50 million wireless electric, gas, and water meters in operation today — many dating back to 1990 when large-scale installations first began. Among all those existing installations, there has been not a single documented case of harm to any person’s health.
Most recently (in November), Maine’s Center for Disease Control published the results of its own analysis of recent research on possible smart meter health effects. The conclusion: “Our review of these agency assessments and studies do not indicate any consistent or convincing evidence to support a concern for health effects related to the use of radio frequency in the range of frequencies and power used by smart meters.”
The FCC provides an excellent primer on radio frequency safety, answering common questions such as, “What biological effects can be caused by RF energy?

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