Sign Our Petition: McCracken County Deserves Transparency and a Real Environmental Study

Three simple asks. One clear demand. Your signature matters more than you know.

Wildlife is an essential part of our ecosystem, and its preservation is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. In McCracken County, we face a pressing challenge: the threat to our local wildlife due to habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. This blog post aims to raise awareness about these issues and encourage you to sign our petition to protect the wildlife that enriches our community.

Over the past several months, a series of decisions have been made about land, water, and public money that belong to all of us. Decisions made quietly. Decisions made quickly. And decisions made without asking the community that will live with the consequences.

Here is the short version.

A foreign-owned nuclear corporation — Global Laser Enrichment, or GLE, owned entirely by Australian and Canadian interests with no American shareholders — has been handed 665 acres of public Kentucky wildlife land to build a uranium enrichment facility in McCracken County. That land was transferred through an arrangement with a local industrial development authority. No public vote was held. No community input was sought.

The facility GLE wants to build sits immediately adjacent to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant — a federal Superfund site with active radioactive contamination in the groundwater, PFAS chemicals still migrating and not under control, and PCBs in the creek tributaries that flow to the Ohio River. The federal government is spending $17 billion to clean up that site. They won't finish until 2065.

McCracken County has committed up to $71.9 million in public money to GLE as part of an incentive package. The terms of that commitment — what form it takes, how long it lasts, what the county is obligated to provide — have been deliberately kept from the public. When a reporter from WKMS asked County Judge Executive Craig Clymer directly what the county was contributing and in what form, he said he couldn't tell us. Because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with GLE before anyone in this community knew what was being negotiated.

And separately, the Department of Energy has solicited private companies to build an AI data center and a small modular nuclear reactor on the Superfund site itself — with no public input process, no independent environmental study, and no award yet announced.

Three separate nuclear and industrial projects. On and immediately adjacent to an active Superfund site. Beside the river that five million people downstream drink from. And not one independent study of what all of it means — together — for our water, our land, our community, or our finances.

That is why we are asking you to sign this petition today.

We are not asking you to oppose economic development.

We are asking you to demand that economic development be honest, transparent, and independently evaluated before McCracken County is committed to decisions it cannot reverse.

We are asking three specific things of the McCracken County Planning Commission — the local body that controls the permits and approvals these projects require before construction can begin. All three are reasonable. All three are within the Commission's existing authority. And all three can be acted on right now, before it is too late.

Ask 1: Place an immediate moratorium on conditional use permits, site plan approvals, and development plan applications for data center and nuclear industrial development on or adjacent to this Superfund site — until Ask 2 is complete.

The Planning Commission has direct authority over every permit and approval these projects require before construction can begin. No conditional use permit has been granted for GLE. No site plan has been approved. No development plan application for the proposed data center or SMR has been filed. The window to act is open — right now — and it will not stay open forever.

A moratorium is not a permanent no. It is a pause — a demand that the community receive complete, honest, independently verified information before irreversible decisions are made. It lifts when Ask 2 is done. Not before.

Ask 2: Require GLE, General Matter, and any data center applicant to each contribute proportionally to fund a single, independent, cumulative environmental and economic impact assessment of all projects together — as a condition of permit consideration. Not the county's money. Theirs. A $20 billion company can afford to fund the study that evaluates its own project's impact on our community.

Three separate federal regulatory processes are currently reviewing pieces of this situation — the NRC is reviewing GLE's facility, the EPA oversees the Superfund cleanup, and a future NEPA review will eventually evaluate the data center if and when a company is selected. But none of them is required to look at all of these projects together. No one is asking what the combined water impact on the Ohio River will be. No one is asking how construction activity from multiple projects will affect the pump-and-treat systems that have been preventing Superfund contamination from reaching the river for nearly 30 years. No one is asking what the combined emergency planning requirement looks like for all of these facilities operating simultaneously.

We are asking that GLE, General Matter, and any data center or SMR applicant be required to jointly fund a single, independent, comprehensive environmental and economic impact assessment, conducted by a qualified firm with no financial relationship to any applicant, before any permit or approval is granted.

That assessment must be released publicly. A minimum 90-day public comment period must follow. And the moratorium in Ask 1 lifts when that process is complete — not before.

GLE's parent company Cameco has a market capitalization of approximately $20 billion. General Matter is backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund with a $1.5 billion project valuation. They can afford the study that evaluates their own project's impact on our community. McCracken County taxpayers should not be paying for it.

Ask 3: Go on record demanding that the nondisclosure agreement between McCracken County and GLE be publicly disclosed before any further approvals are granted. A planning commission is a public body. It should not be approving development whose financial terms have been proactively kept from the community by the very official elected to represent it.

McCracken County has committed up to $71.9 million in public money to GLE. The community does not know what form that commitment takes — whether it is a PILOT agreement reducing GLE's property taxes for decades, a tax increment financing district redirecting future revenue away from county schools and services, or an industrial revenue bond arrangement that leverages McCracken County's credit rating for a foreign corporation's benefit. We do not know how long it lasts. We do not know what happens if GLE fails to deliver its promised jobs, closes, or leaves.

We do not know — because our own Judge Executive signed a nondisclosure agreement with a foreign nuclear corporation and has refused to share the terms with the community whose money was committed.

Public money committed by public officials on behalf of a public community is public information. The Planning Commission should not be granting approvals for development whose financial terms have been deliberately kept from the people paying for it.

Why your signature matters

We know what you might be thinking. Petitions don't stop projects. Politicians ignore them. The deals are already made.

Here is what we know from communities across the country that have faced the same situation.

As of this month, 69 U.S. jurisdictions have enacted active moratoriums on data center development — up from just 8 one year ago. Four of those moratoriums are permanent. In Pocatello, Idaho, more than 300 residents showed up to a public hearing on a proposed AI data center. A hearing examiner overruled her own planning staff's recommendation for approval and denied the permit — because the community showed up, spoke up, and created a record that could not be dismissed. In Maine, community pressure changed what was possible at the state level even when the full moratorium bill failed. In Georgia, Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, community voices forced elected officials to act who would otherwise have waved these projects through without question.

This is a national reckoning — bipartisan, accelerating, and driven by ordinary people who decided that the speed, scale, and secrecy of industrial development in their communities was not acceptable.

Your signature does three concrete things.

It creates a record. When this petition is delivered to the McCracken County Planning Commission, it becomes part of the official record of community input. Officials who later approve permits without addressing these concerns will have to explain — on the record — why they did so despite documented opposition from their own community.

It signals that this community is paying attention. A petition with hundreds of signatures says something that a single public comment cannot: this community is engaged, it is informed, and it is not going away.

It puts your name on the right side of this decision. These decisions will have consequences for decades. The water, the land, the financial obligations — they will all outlast the press releases and the ribbon cuttings. Your signature today is a statement about what kind of community McCracken County is, and what it expects from the people making decisions in its name.

What happens after you sign

We will deliver this petition to the McCracken County Planning Commission at an upcoming Planning Commission meeting... and at every subsequent meeting where GLE-related applications or approvals are on the agenda.

We will deliver it to the McCracken County Fiscal Court with a formal request for public disclosure of the county's NDA agreement with GLE.

We will deliver it to our state legislators with a request that they use their statutory authority under Kentucky's Open Records Act to demand the records the community has been denied. Under Kentucky law, members of the General Assembly have Open Records access that cannot be denied under the economic development exemption that Judge Clymer has used to justify his silence.

We will deliver it to the Kentucky Attorney General's Office along with a formal Open Records Request for the county's full financial agreement with GLE.

And we will deliver it to the federal officials overseeing the DOE's data center solicitation at the Paducah site as evidence that this community expects a meaningful public input process before any award is made.

Your signature stays with this petition through every one of those deliveries. It counts every time.

Want to know more?

We have done extensive research on every aspect of these projects — the land transfer, the financial deal, the contamination at the Superfund site, the regulatory gaps, and the national context. All of it is sourced and verifiable. We are publishing a series of blog posts on this site covering each issue in depth, with links to primary sources so you can check every fact yourself.

We encourage you to read them — and to share them with everyone you know in McCracken County and western Kentucky. The more people who understand what is happening here, the harder it becomes for officials to proceed as if nobody is watching.

Because we are watching. And we are asking you to watch with us.

A final word

The people making decisions about McCracken County's future are counting on this community not paying close enough attention. That the press releases will be enough. That the announcement of a billion-dollar investment will close the conversation before anyone thinks to ask what the community actually receives in return.

We are counting on something different. We are counting on McCracken County being the kind of community that asks hard questions. That demands honest answers. That knows the difference between a headline and a ledger. That understands what it means when an elected official signs a nondisclosure agreement with a foreign corporation about public money — and refuses to tell you what's in it.

This land was poisoned once in the name of national interest. Before it is handed to a foreign corporation to be used again — this time in the name of economic development — this community deserves to know the real cost.

Sign the petition. Share it with your neighbors. Show up at the public meetings.

Let our officials know that the citizens of McCracken County are watching.

Sign the Petition

After you sign: please share this page on Facebook, text it to your neighbors, and bring it up at your church, your school, and your workplace. Every name on this petition makes the next person more willing to add theirs.

Questions? Read our blog series for detailed, sourced research on every aspect of these projects. Want to do more than sign? Let us know in the petition notes area and we'll add you to the outreach list.