>>>It's kind of laughable to see people worrying about magnetic fields after the press and the government have squashed concerns about almost everyone being baked 24 hours/day by microwave radiation from cell towers. In any city you get more microwave radiation in a day than your microwave oven would give you if you sat with the oven on and your face at the glass 24 hours/day.
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>>Interesting, do you have any references for that? It seems counterintuitive to me, radiation exposure is an inverse-square function, and the closest anyone gets to a cell tower is a *lot* farther than when you're standing in front of a microwave oven.
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>But in a city environment you are in range of probably dozens of cell towers at any given time.

Well, just some rough calculations:

- Suppose you have a 700W microwave oven, and you're 1 meter away (if you're looking in the microwave you're probably closer than that)

- Suppose your average distance to a cell tower transmitter during the day is 100 meters (I suspect a realistic average is farther than that, but we'll be conservative)

Since it's an inverse-square law with distance, the effect, per watt, of the cell tower is 1 / (100^2), or 1/10,000th as much.

To get the same effect as a microwave oven from a single cell tower would require the tower's power to be

700W x 10,000 = 7MW

However, if there are actually 10 cell towers 100m away from you then the power of each would be only 1/10 that figure, or 700kW.

IOW you get the same radiation from:

- a 700W microwave oven at 1m
- one 7MW cell tower at 100m
- ten 700kW cell towers at 100m

I don't know the average input power of a cell tower, but 700kW is a lot, and 7MW is a heck of a lot. And again, the 100m distance is probably quite conservative, and if the real value is higher then the power of the cell tower(s) would need to be a lot higher than these calculations.

Here's a link that claims you don't need to worry about cell towers: http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook/radio/2007/04/undestanding-cell-phone-tower-health.html

Update: a comment at that link claims a typical cell tower power input is only 35W.