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HEADLINE: Tough new health rules threaten power groups

BYLINE: BY MARY FAGAN

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THE electricity industry faces potentially huge costs from an expected toughening of regulations on the siting of power lines by the National Radiological Protection Board.

Within the next few weeks, the NRPB will issue proposals for new guidelines on electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from power cables. These will reignite the debate over the potential link between power lines and cancer. The move to tighter public guidelines could prompt a raft of lawsuits from families worried about the effects of radiation from overhead lines.

Putting power lines underground would cost the industry hundreds of millions of pounds. A mile of underground cabling costs up to pounds 16m to install compared with less than pounds 1m per mile for overhead cables.

Keith McCormick, whose garden in Northampton contains two pylons owned by East Midlands Electricity, was recently refused the right to have them removed by the Department of Trade and Industry. McCormick, who is concerned there could be a link between EMFs and childhood leukaemia, said he would appeal on the grounds that the NRPB was considering changes to guidelines when the DTI ruled.

The DTI said: "A group of experts is already considering theories that the electromagnetic fields of overhead power lines are associated with a range of illnesses and are expected to report their findings to the NRPB by the end of 2002."

It said a public meeting will be held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham on December 5, "ahead of which the NRPB will publish a consultation document with revised guidelines on limiting public exposure to EMFs".

Dr John Swanson, the scientific adviser to the Electricity Association and an expert witness in the McCormick case, said the industry is fully supportive of the consultation and the open debate. "I have never gone around telling people categorically that power lines are safe because that would not be honest," he said.

EMFs are measured in microteslas and the UK limits on public exposure are 1,600 units compared with 100 in most European countries. In some regions of Italy the limit is as low as 0.2 and just 1 for some new installations in Switzerland.

An NRPB study last year on possible links between electric and magnetic fields generated by power lines and cancer stated that there is no firm evidence that such fields can cause childhood leukaemia, but that without further research "the possibility remains that intense and prolonged exposure to magnetic fields can increase the risk of leukaemia in chidren".
[PS]City: [ES]