Water meters.
This spring, Madison's water utility launched Project H2O, an initiative to upgrade every water meter in the city. Once completed, thousands of decades-old analog meters -- ones that have to be checked manually and nobody makes parts for anymore -- will be replaced with digital wireless meters. Us Northsiders are the first group of residents to get the upgrade (mine was installed a few weeks ago).
The "smart meter" technology being installed seems like a no-brainer. Monitoring usage in real- or near-real-time will help the city better utilize its existing water infrastructure, and future innovations like demand-based pricing will help Madisonians conserve resources and save money. Using what we have more efficiently and changing our habits are what sustainability is all about, right?
But there's a catch, at least in the minds of some. These new meters are wireless, meaning that they beam radio waves (RF) into your home. And RF is one of the favorite bugaboos among conspiracy-minded Internet communities, right up there with fluoridation and vaccination.
The science on this is sketchy at best. It's a challenge to find reliable sources outside the network of anti-RF websites and journals. The only large-scale study on RF and health that's universally seen as valid is a decade-long European study on "heavy" cell phone users, which led the World Health Organization to classify RF as "potentially carcinogenic."** That terminology sounds scary, but if you read the press release you come across qualifiers that say "we have this one cell phone study that suggests a possible link, but nothing to make a definitive conclusion and no idea what the actual mechanism would be." And the study itself contains several caveats and qualifications, enough that the authors didn't feel they could make any sort of definite conclusion.
Those of you who remember your physics classes know that RF is just one type of electromagnetic radiation, the spectrum that goes from radio and microwaves at the bottom, through visible and ultraviolet light, on up to X-rays and gamma rays. Just like visible light, RF is non-ionizing; it doesn't have enough power to knock your atoms apart. So RF isn't dangerous like X-rays are -- if it was, we'd have to wear lead shields all day like the one your dentist gives you.
Intense RF can cause heating by causing molecules to flip around, as the popcorn in your microwave oven can attest, and safety guidelines on RF exposure are based on preventing this kind of heating. Madison water staff posted a link to a study that directly measured smart meters used in California for electric service, which found that under the most generous conditions (a relay station transmitting from a stucco house) RF exposure was 0.065% of the federal safety guideline.
Let's say for a moment that the feds are minimizing this as a public health problem under pressure from the utilities. Are we supposed to believe that their definition of dangerous is at least 1,538* times too low? There are a lot of communications workers out there...surely we'd have heard by now if huge numbers of them were getting severe burns or odd cancers.
If residents really want to opt out of Project H2O, they probably should be able to. But people who prey upon the general public's ignorance of science and statistics really get my hackles up. (I should know, I work with education data, probably the single most abused type of statistical information in American public policy.) RF-as-a-health-hazard is a conspiracy theory whose best piece of evidence is a single, inconclusive study on a device that's designed to be used half an inch from your brain. It shouldn't deter Madison from moving forward with this practical conservation project.
* 1/0.00065, which is 1/0.065%
** Other items on that list: carpentry, talcum power, kimchi.
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