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The Brussels Post, 1979-09-12, Page 2BRUSSELS. ONTARIO WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1979 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros, Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association 'Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10,00 a Year. Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each. •C NA BLUE R I BBOICI AWARD antrit'-. Sugar and spice Brussels Post your sewers! Many pedple in Brussels will probably be breathing a sigh of relief now that a major portion of the sewer work in Brussels has been completed. But though it might seem as if Brussels residents have suffered a lot in the past few months with all the detours, especially the ones around those five mile blocks, things weren't nearly as bad as they could have been. The work could have dragged on for a few more months causing even more inconvenience to motorists. Brussels was lucky enough to .get some fast working construction crews along with the necessary ,'.'supervision to get the jobs done. And though Brussels may have suffered some misery, the village is iikely to benefit quite significantly from all the hassles in the end. The sewers will alleviate the pollution problems and probably Could attract more new industry to the village. No matter what people feel about having the sewers come to Brussels, they're here to stay and the village might as well sit back and enjoy the ben is the sewers will bring. Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston Let's get the truth By Bill Smiley Man, it's good to get back to work after a long, hot, wet, cold, dry summer. A good many teachers, with a long summer holiday, do something exciting, interesting, or at least constructive. Some go on exotic trips to faraway places, and return to bore you with their experiences for the next ten months. Others go to the Stratford Festival, or take a course in potting pottery, or go on a long boat trip in their own boat, or have an affair, or make fifty gallons of peach wine, or grow a beard. Still others build a patio, or tear down a barn, or take a summer course to improve their qualifications, or prepare their courses for the fall term. Or something equally dull. Every year, it's the same thing with me. I make great plans for the summer, around the middle of June. Write a book, go to the Yukon or Newfoundland, revisit boyhood haunts, have an affair, grow a beard and long hair, catch a hundred bass, shoot a par round in golf. And this summer, as so often, I accomplished absolutely zilch. I barely got my weekly column written. I travelled no more than 120 miles from home. I re-visited nothing except the town library. The only affair I've had was with a big cedar deck chair in my back yard. I'm clean-shaven and short-haired. I caught one nine-inch bass. I did shoot a par in golf. On one hole. I'll have to admit what my wife suggested every second day all summer, "You're a lazy bum." Well, we're not all perfect. I did get quite a few meals. Peanut butter sandwich and banana for breakfast. Freshmade sandwiches from The Oasis for lunch. Chicken pies, fish and chips, turkey dinner, Salsbury steak and gravy, all of them frozen, for dinner. Sometimes, when my menus began to repeat themselves, I'd send out for Chinese food. One night, carried away by some wild primitive instinct, I actually cooked up fresh potatoes, green beans, and a chunk of $2.98 sirloin. But made the mistake of making steak gravy. It came out looking like the inner side of a diaper, and nobody could eat the steak. One other memorable meal was a stew I made. The usual stuff - onions, carrots, meat, a couple of spuds. It tasted a little flat, so I hit the spice cupboard and chucked in a few shots of everything but mustard, then squirted in about half a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. The steak had body and a je ne sais quoi that my old lady tried to figure out for days. Aside from the cooking, there wasn't much to do. For various and sundry reasons, too miscella,neous to list, we weren't able to do any of the things we'd planned. Maybe that's why we wound up with a phone bill nudging the $200 mark. Per month. A sick brother, the colonel, in hospital in Montreal, flown out from James Bay after a collapse. The breakdown of a deal to rent a camper and go visiting. Worrying and trying to help, as my daughter had prepared to head for the other side of James Bay to teach Indian kids music. Five years ago, that girl could, hardly write a cheque. Now here she was, arranging all the details of a major move, with two small boys: travel tickets, baggage shipment, getting a piano crated, trying to dispose of a car-that won't start, and coping with a hundred other problems. Jolly good for her. And getting through yet another wed- ding, this time a niece from Edmonton, with my old lady running in circles over gifts, clothes and all the other garbage connected with weddings. Wanted to see Kim and grandboys off for the north. Did you ever try to get a hotel mom in Toronto during the C.N.E.? Travel agent called twelve hotels, and the only thing she could come up with was a deluxe double, whatever that is, at $76.00 a night. A little rich for the blood, what? A one-night stand we could hack, but we wanted it for four. What would you do? I won't tell. So, all in all, the summer was a big, fat bore. Not any help was me with a fat, arthritic foot when my wife was fit, and she with some kind of horrible sore back when my foot was fit. It didn't help that the lawnmower went on the blink, and I flatly refused to take it back to the robber who charged me $55.00 to get it going last time. "Let the dam' grass grow. That way the neighbours won't be able to see that I haven't painted the falling-down back porch." Oh, it wasn't a total loss. I had a serious chat with my contractor neighbour about building a back deck to the house to replace the tumbled heap of stones onto which the French windows presently permit access. We may get it done next year. Neighbour's too busy. I called a guy twice to come and do some brick-work. He'd be there for sure. Haven't seen him yet. Water tank in cellar began to leak. $200 for a new one. Sat by the hour, looking at cedar summer furniture, stripped to a grey-white by five years of weather, and studied just how it would look when sanded and stained and varnished. It's too late now to get it done this year. Read three hundred books. Watched three hundred third-run movies. Almost blind from reading. Piles bad from beer. Man, am I glad to be back to work! Good to get to work The fuss over nuclear power has died down a bit of late with no resolution in sight. For the proponents of nuclear power, of course, the very fact the storm has eased is a victory for them. As long as public criticism stays silent then it is a tacit approval as far as Ontario Hydro and other nuclear industry people are concerned. Even when the uproar in the aftermath of Harrisburg and the Schultz revelations about the operations at the Bruce station was at its highest people such as Premier Davis were saying that nuclear power must continue to be expanded. One of the people who provided some of the shocks during that controversial time a few short months back was Dr. William Porter, the man who headed the commis- sion looking into electric power planning in Ontario. While the politicians and utility experts were assuring us that something like the Three Mile Island accident couldn't happen at an Ontario l'Ower plant Dr. Porter said it could and probably would if the use of atomic power increased. He pointed out that while the utility people tell you that there's only a one-in-a 'million chance of something going wrong those odds decrease each year by the sheer fact that there are more and more power plants being built. If there is a one-in-anitillion chance of an accident at one plant, there IS a two-in-a-million chance when you have two plants and so on. Today with so many power plants being built the odds are getting too close for comfort. At the time he made these statements it was a refreshing bit of candour on Dr. Porter's part. We had been told for so long that nothing could go wrong and yet it had and we were still being told that nothing had really gone wrong, that it had all been blown out of proportion. We just didn't know who we could trust any more in this complicated issue. Here was a voice with some honesty. Yet if the honesty was refreshing from Dr. Porter at this point, it became absolutely frightening a couple of weeks ago when he was interviewed on a television public affairs program, an interview which strangely received little attention at the time. Again Dr, Porter was quite candid about the risks of nuclear power but he said the risks were worth the benefits. Even if there was a nuclear accident, and up to 25,000 people were killed, he said, he'd endorse the use of nuclear energy. We have no other choice, he claimed. His backup for this insane argument was that after all we needed electricity to save lives in places like hospitals. He also argues that other things such as airplanes were also dangerous but we continued to use them because of their benefits. And indeed over the years we probably have killed off 25,000 people in airplanes. We've also massacred thousands more automobiles and continued to use them. But the flaw in the argument is that in the case of airplanes and automobiles. people know the risks they are taking. They accept the risks for the benefits. We haven't •been told the risks and have only been sold the benefits. In addition with the danger of planes and cars it is the people getting the benefits who take the risks. It is easy for someone say in London, to say the risk of nuclear power is worth it for the benefits received but it isn't him that is taking the risk. He's rolling the dice with the lives of the people living around the Bruce plant taking all the risks. And with cars and planes we risk only lives, not the immense changes that radiation leaks can bring to the whole environment. Of course the argument about needed electricity for hospitals is so ridiculous it hardly dignifies response. Our hospitals already have electricity to save lives. The increase in demand on the part of hospitals for electricity is not large. It's servicing the demand for industry and the home that is the reason for expansion of nuclear power. The proponents of nuclear power are right when they say that it's either build more power plants or get along without some of the luxuries we might. have in 'the coming years. Those who question the expansion .of nuclear power must ask themselves if they're ready to make that sacrifice. The politicians and planners are probably right that most Of the population would rather take the risks than give up the luxuries they feel are their rights. But the politicians and planners are dishonest in not telling people the real facts and telling them the alternatives straight from the shoulder. We need to be told the truth about the dangers just as Dr. Porter told us and we also need to be told we have a choice, that by conservation we can reduce our demand for power and reduce the need for atomic power. The people in control of the utilities, however, don't want us to have that choice apparently. They want to go on our merry, wasteful ways even if it means thousands get killed in an accident. Ontario Hydro is inexcuseable in its deceit. Nearly every day we hear about this or that small happening at the Bruce plant, each time being assured it is completely harmless. We get so tired of this daily report that we begin to think that Hydro officials are giving us all the facts. It is only much later that we find out that while a worker stubbing his toe yesterday was widely reported, a year or so ago the whole Douglas Point and Bruce complex was shut down because there was genuine concern there might be a melt down and we were never told. I don't know all the facts on nuclear power but I think it's damned well time we Were given the truth so we can make our own choices, We've had enough of this whitewashing.