Value chain · CLM-1067
In plain terms
The one primate experiment that looked alarming in 1980 - over half the infants dying in the highest-exposure group - did not repeat when rerun with more animals; the reviewer of the rodent work argued that a pregnant woman might absorb far less than the rats did, but that male fertility was the harder question.
The claim as recorded
The programme's primate study reported at the April 1980 review a mortality signal it was already retesting: 41 pregnant squirrel monkeys exposed at 0, 0.1, 1.0 or 10.0 mW/cm2 equivalent for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, showed infant deaths of 0 in the control group and "22, 17, and 56%" in the 0.1, 1.0 and 10.0 mW/cm2 groups respectively, "four of the five infants that died in the 10.0 group were exposed both pre- and postnatally, suggesting a cumulative effect", against a colony first-year mortality of "20 to 25%"; the larger second study at 10 mW/cm2, 3 hours daily 7 days a week from the first trimester, had "not verified the original mortality findings" - 21 live births, 4 stillbirths, 6 abortions and 6 infant deaths exposed against 22, 7, 5 and 7 control - so that "it would not appear that SPS frequency microwaves at power levels of 10 mW/cm2 are lethal to primate offspring chronically exposed pre- and postnatally". The EPA's teratology review at the same session argued from absorption scaling that "Women in a 2450 MHz field may experience only 1/10 of the rat's or 1/50 of the mouse's absorption rates", that surface-directed absorption "may not represent a hazard to the human fetus, even if power densities do reach 23 mW/cm2", but that testes "immediately below the skin surface" were "possibly a different case", citing rat "temporary sterility ... after 4 weeks of exposure for 4 hours per day ... 28 mW/cm2" and "Death due to over-exposure at 2450 MHz begins to occur in the rat at only 40 mW/cm2".
Evidence behind this: T3, a primate teratology status report with two rendered tables, and an EPA reviewer's scaling argument over the rodent literature.
Scope and limits
Small groups (4 to 8 mothers per cell); necropsies on four of nine; the second study "has not yet been completed". Berman's is a scaling argument over roughly sixty papers, explicitly "tenuous".
What it assumes
The "equivalent" mW/cm2 is the cavity-cage whole-body dose scaled from plane-wave calorimetry on saline dolls, as the paper describes.
Where it comes from
PDF p.413 / printed 392, normalised: "41 pregnant squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) ... (0, 0.1, 1.0, or 10.0 mW/cm2 equivalent)"; "Exposures occurred 3 hr/day, 5 days/week". PDF p.414 / printed 393: "No infants died in the control group, compared with 22, 17, and 56% in the 0.1, 1.0, and 10.0 mW/cm2 groups, respectively. The annual mortality rate during the first year of life of animals born in our colony over the last 5 years has averaged 20 to 25%"; "four of the five infants that died in the 10.0 group were exposed both pre- and postnatally, suggesting a cumulative effect of the microwave exposures"; "the results obtained so far have not verified the original mortality findings". PDF p.415 / printed 394, Table 1, render read: control 8 mothers, 8 live births, 0, 0; gestation-and-first-year 10.0 mW/cm2 6 mothers, 5 live births, 0 mother deaths, 4 infant deaths at 58, 78, 143, 177 days. PDF p.416 / printed 395, Table 2, render read: Microwave 21, 4, 6, 6; Control 22, 7, 5, 7; the conclusion sentence as quoted. PDF p.409 / printed 388: "The mouse fetus responds to daily exposure at 2450 MHz and 28 mW/cm2, conditions very related to SPS, with a body weight decrease. The rat fetus appears unmoved"; "Death due to over-exposure at 2450 MHz begins to occur in the rat at only 40 mW/cm2"; the 1/10 and 1/50 sentence; the "may not represent a hazard" sentence. PDF p.410 / printed 389: "a temporary sterility was induced in males after 4 weeks of exposure for 4 hours per day in a microwave field of 2450 MHz and 28 mW/cm2. Testicular temperatures in this regimen reached 37.5 C in 90 minutes"; "the models are tenuous".
Basis: mW/cm2 equivalent; live births, deaths; hours per day
Related records
- Answers question
- QST-001 not published in this release
Cite this
energyaperture.com/c/clm-1067
CLM-1067, Energy Aperture, as of 1980-04.
Connected records
Other published records linked to this one. A list, not a judgement.
- Also from SRC-449
- CLM-0964To build two of these satellites a year, about 300 tonnes of material had to arrive at the orbital construction site every day. Getting it...CLM-0974The 1978 reference design shows every loss between sunlight and the power grid as a chain of numbered boxes, and the boxes multiply out...CLM-0975Depending on which published assumptions you take, a satellite needs between about 2 and 6 square kilometres of solar blanket for every...CLM-1058The often-repeated claim that the magnetron is 188 decibels quieter than its carrier traces to a conference abstract in which the tube...CLM-1059By spring 1980 the engineers, the reviewing panel and the ionosphere experimenters were all saying the beam-intensity ceiling the whole...CLM-1060The 1980 review did not agree with itself on how much of a satellite's cost was rockets: one paper said over a third, the programme's own...CLM-1061In one 1980 volume the satellite cost anywhere from about 2,300 to 3,800 dollars a kilowatt depending on who added what - and the programme...CLM-1062In 1980 the launch vehicle that everything was costed on was said by its own designers to be arbitrarily big, and they proposed a rocket a...More on the source page.