Joshua Massey's Statement to the McCracken County Planning Commission - May 27, 2026

Hello, everyone. Friends and neighbors and members of McCracken County, my name is Joshua Massey. I was born and raised here and I'm here tonight on behalf of my friends and family and my community because I care very deeply about it. I stand beside a lot of intellectuals who've brought a lot of data forward. I trust that you'll read Erica's packet carefully and keep it for consideration.

There is one element of data I'd like to address before I get into my more philosophical waxing and that is the Price Anderson Act. It has to do with insurance on nuclear reactors. What it says is that every nuclear reactor (which they're talking about putting a small modular reactor at the AI data facility that General Matters building) every nuclear reactor must be insured at the maximum amount of private insurance legally available. That amount is $450 million. And it also includes an indemnity clause, which indemnifies companies of any liability if they do damages that exceed that number of $450 million.

My feeling is that anything that has the capacity -- because these laws wouldn't exist unless that were a real possibility, it's not just a hypothetical -- anything with the possibility to do that much damage really should not be legally allowed to exist, and I certainly don't want it anywhere near my home or my friends or my family.

So what is the dollar amount value of a human life?

According to the National Academy of Science, there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation exposure. So I believe that there should be no legal safe limit of ionizing radiation exposure. I don't think anybody should be exposed to it. Yet, here we are in the state of Kentucky, where we have the highest incidence rate of every form of cancer and the highest cancer mortality rate of all fifty states.

So I ask: how many McCracken County residents must get cancer and die before we decide that bringing in industry that we know can cause cancer is just not worth the financial incentive? 

According to GLE's report, the nearest residents to the site is 150 feet away... what is the dollar amount value of those home owners’ lives? How much money is required to make it feel okay to give another human being cancer?

This community is being told, hey, some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice that billionaires from Silicon Valley and foreign investment funds are willing to make. And that doesn't seem fair. And your tax dollars are going to help them do it.

They say no taxation without representation. We pay our taxes. And yet these companies that are having many of their taxes waived are being represented more than we are in our legislation. That doesn't seem fair.

The public doesn't want this. We want an alternative that doesn't have the potential to do over four hundred and fifty million dollars in damages to our community. Damage that we then have to pay for.

Life is supposed to be an unalienable right, and I believe that uranium enrichment and uranium hexafluoride has already alienated that right from too many of us here in McCracken County.

Thank you.