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Are people, especially kids, who work with unshielded electronics at risk from radiation?

As far as I know about computers, the metallic casing, including some Faraday effects/shielding is required as part of proper responsible system design.

Examples:

This guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWhO-l1U33o has mainboards lying in a shelf. Even the facebook http://opencompute.org platform relies on servers open on one side. Even worse, the early Google stack of boards in LEGOs...

In data centers, humans are not really accounted for, same as with noise levels: okay for machines, bad for humans.

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This is interesting but seems to me that it is more leading to open-ended discussion than something that can be specifically answerable. So I'm voting to close. FWIW I'm not a phyisicist but I'm sure EMR radiations from motherboards pale in comparison to cellular towers, TV/radio stations, wifi routers, and power plants, but I could be wrong and don't really know anything about the subject. – ultrasawblade Dec 24 '11 at 14:37
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I care about high frequency electro-magnetic radiation in the 400 to 700 Terahertz range, and am quite disappointed and inconvenienced when my computers don't radiate it. – JdeBP Dec 24 '11 at 16:18
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With a bit of an edit to remove some potentially obscuring detail, I think it's a fair question: "Are kids who work with open/unshielded mother-boards at risk from radiation?" As such, the question is complete, to the point, and answerable to the extent of current knowledge. I've made a minor edit to bring that out. Voting to reopen. – JRobert Dec 24 '11 at 20:59
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If you know of any evidence that unshielded computer equipment poses any kind of health hazard to humans, please cite it. – David Schwartz Dec 24 '11 at 21:23
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I'm pretty sure that big huge light source in the sky bombard you with more radiation than 100 computers. Just my guess. I mean, it has the output of 10000000 super computers. – surfasb Dec 25 '11 at 9:45
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closed as not a real question by ultrasawblade, techie007, random♦ Dec 24 '11 at 19:03

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1 Answer

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The reason for requiring shielding around high frequency electronics is (in most cases) for prevention of interference with other devices, notably radio and TV receivers. Radio frequency exposure isn't really a factor for humans and animals until you're hanging out near a transmitter antenna, where the amount of power driving the RF is at least several orders of magnitude greater than that within a typical digital device.

Also, not all radiation is harmful; visible light is radiation, f/ex. RF radiation is not the same as ionizing- or hard-radiation like that from radioactive decay. RF radiation is more likely to cook cells (at sufficient power) but isn't otherwise harmful -- as far as anyone has been definitively able to tell -- at least in short to medium term exposures. The jury is still out on the question of cell phone transmitters millimeters from one's head for hours a day. That's a case where prudent avoidance may be the best policy, until we know more. For now, it's a judgement call.

Back to your question about unshielded computer boards: I wouldn't strap them to my head 24/7, but I'd have no concerns about working with them a couple of feet from me.

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Thanks for the in-depth answer. – isync Dec 28 '11 at 15:04
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