Methods used to estimate residential exposure to 50 Hz magnetic fields from overhead power lines in an epidemiological study in France

Abstract

An epidemiological study of paediatric cancers in relation with various environmental factors is currently being carried out in France. One of these factors is the proximity of children’s residences to high voltage overhead lines (63–400 kV). This possible influence will be studied following three criteria, namely ‘distance’, ‘distance–voltage’ and ‘calculated residential exposure’ to extremely low frequency magnetic field (ELF-MF). This paper describes methods for generating and characterising these three criteria of increasing complexity and characterises the influence of the input data in terms of uncertainties in the exposure to ELF-MF assigned to subjects. The method developed for the ‘calculated residential exposure’ criterion is based on a limited number of configurations of overhead lines, selected to have a representative sample of the French high voltage (HV) network. The calculated exposure is then fitted to each subject and each neighbouring overhead line, taking into account the yearly mean current flowing in the line and the distance of the residence from the power line. All variability factors introduced by this simplified representation have been analysed, classified and quantified to give the best assessment and associated confidence interval of the residential ELF-MF exposure of the subjects. The overall 1σ uncertainty of the calculated residential exposure excluding geo-coding uncertainties is around 8% for subjects living close to power lines with a known current load and 17% for the others.