Smart electric meters: are the signals a cancer risk?

This page looks at the worry that smart electric meters cause cancer, and at what the National Cancer Institute (NCI) says about them.

An old electricity meter sat on the wall and waited. Someone had to come and read it. A smart meter sends the reading itself. It uses a wireless signal, usually in short bursts.

That wireless signal is why the meters became controversial. Anything that transmits gets lumped in with phones, towers and Wi-Fi.

NCI's fact sheet on electromagnetic fields goes through common radiofrequency sources one by one. Smart meters get their own line. NCI writes that smart meters produce very low level fields that sometimes cannot be distinguished from the total background.

Sit with the phrase total background for a moment. Your house already has an electromagnetic background. The wiring in the walls. The fridge. The television. Radio and broadcast signals passing through. NCI is saying the meter adds so little that you may not be able to pick it out from what was already there.

When a source cannot be separated from background, there is little for a health effect to attach to.

Smart meters belong to a broad category called non-ionizing electromagnetic fields. Non-ionizing means the energy is too weak to strip electrons from atoms. NCI's conclusions about that whole category are what matter here.

The fact sheet lists other everyday sources for comparison. Cell phones. Wi-Fi routers. Cell towers and base stations. Broadcast antennas. Radar. MRI machines. On broadcast towers, for example, it notes that radiofrequency exposures near the base of these towers are below guideline limits.

Its overall verdict is twofold. No mechanism has been identified by which extremely low frequency fields or radiofrequency radiation could cause cancer. And across the studies of children and adults it reviews, NCI reports that no consistent evidence has been found linking any source of non-ionizing EMF to cancer.

IARC, the World Health Organization's cancer research agency, made a classification in 2002. It called extremely low frequency fields possibly carcinogenic to humans, based on limited evidence about childhood leukemia. It placed static fields in the not classifiable group. Neither judgment was about meters.

Smart meters went onto millions of homes without anyone asking permission. Often a contractor fitted one and explained nothing. That breeds suspicion, whatever the physics says. Something appeared on the outside wall of a house, unasked for, transmitting.

Feeling uneasy about that is not irrational. The jump from uneasy to cancer-causing is where the evidence stops following.

Say you want to lower cancer risk in your own home. These exposures have strong federal evidence behind them, and you can act on all of them:

• Tobacco smoke indoors, including secondhand smoke.
• Radon, which rises up through the ground and can be measured with a home test.
• Sun exposure, for skin cancer.
• Alcohol intake.

None of these feels as satisfying as pulling one box off a wall. All of them rest on better evidence.

A fear like this one can grow during a hard stretch. Perhaps after a diagnosis in the family, or during a long course of treatment. If worry about the meter is eating hours of your week, mention it to your care team. It counts as a well-being issue in its own right. Anxiety can be treated. Living under a threat you cannot check is exhausting, and that deserves real support.