Dear Editor:
Once again I find myself in agreement with Mike Sterling in his latest lament over the loss of the proposed Nuclear Innovation Institute in Southampton: “…Yes, of course Bruce Power could put Innovation out on Highway 21 or in some other Community in the County, but it won’t be the same. The Campus idea will be lost and our children and grandchildren will be the worse for it.”
I would even go a step further by adding a personal feeling that others might share: “Wherever the Nuclear Institute is eventually located, I will always have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when passing by it, or reading about it, being reminded of what Southampton could have had.”
Southampton’s loss will certainly be another community’s gain. Sadly, the writing is now on the wall and we all must live with the loser label, as distasteful as it will be.
Being of sympathetic nature however, in truth, I find myself feeling sorry for those who negatively influenced Bruce Power’s decision to pull out of the preferred location of the Institute, adjacent to our wonderful museum facility. I think too, about the imagined embarrassment of one of the anti-Institute protesters who ill-advisedly attempted to circulate a petition in one of our church sanctuaries on a Sunday morning and was politely and properly asked to cease and desist.
The anti-faction and vocal protesters are well known in Southampton and, rest assured, they will be forever frowned on, eventually even be quietly ostracized, in town social circles. I simply would not want to be them, knowing what people are assuredly saying in hushed tones behind their backs wherever they may go. The now infamous “whistle-blowing” incident at a public information meeting leading up to Bruce Power’s unexpected surprise decision, will likewise jokingly live on in perpetuity whenever this sad period in Southampton’s history is discussed — and it WILL be discussed.
This is truly a case where there is shame in the smugness of a few…and inherited eternal damnation.
Dick Wright, Southampton
