Their Own Expert Already Told Them Our Questions Are Legitimate

Before we get to Judge Clymer's post from last week, there's something the community needs to see first.

Dr. Patrick White, the Group Lead for Fusion, Safety and Regulation at the Clean Air Task Force, was invited to lead the county's official Community Education meeting, required for McCracken County to become a designated Nuclear-Ready Community. In an email obtained through an open records request, White pulled out of that meeting himself. He didn't want to put his reputation on the line and wasn't in a position to answer the legitimate concerns we raised.

Then he put this in writing: "I think that several of the questions raised by Protect McCracken County group are legitimate and that any future community meetings should be prepared with appropriate experts to fully address them."

Read that again. This isn't us saying it. This is the outside expert the county itself brought in, telling the county in writing that our questions hold up.

That email was sent June 3, 2026. Judge Clymer's Facebook post calling our concerns misinformation came three weeks later.

Now, about that post

Judge Clymer posted this week asking people to "get one thing straight" about the land swap, the jobs, and the growth coming to West McCracken County. We're glad he's addressing this publicly. Public conversation is exactly what we've been asking for.

But a public post deserves a full public answer, not just a comment buried in a thread.

We have never asked anyone to shut this down

Nowhere on our website, in any letter, or in any meeting have we called for stopping development altogether. Our ask has stayed the same since day one: an independent, cumulative study of what this construction does to the Superfund cleanup already underway next door, before more permits and public money are locked in.

Judge Clymer's own post makes our point for us. In one comment, he lists two uranium enrichment facilities each spending over a billion and a half dollars, a metal recycling facility, and a likely AI data center announcement, all in the same small stretch of ground that already hosts one of the largest federal cleanup sites in the country. Each project gets reviewed on its own. None of them get reviewed together.

That gap is the whole reason this campaign exists, and it's the same gap that made the county's own invited expert walk away from the podium.

It IS a bad land deal for McCracken County residents

Judge Clymer's post frames the land swap as a win: 665 acres out, 1,068 acres in. On paper, that looks like more. But acreage on a spreadsheet isn't the same as land people actually use.

The 665 acres given to GLE came out of the West Kentucky Wildlife Management Area, right here in McCracken County. That land was never county property. It belonged to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. But it was still part of our community. Residents hiked it, hunted it, and spent time on it for years. Judge Clymer gave away a piece of McCracken County, and the flood-prone acreage he got back in Fulton County doesn't make up for what we lost.

Judge Clymer calls that a good trade because the acreage math works out. But nobody in McCracken County gets to walk that new land on a Saturday morning. It's not here. It's not usable the same way. And it's not what residents were asked about before it happened.

Nothing guarantees these jobs go to McCracken County residents, and even if they did, 380 jobs isn't a jobs boom

GLE committed to 240 jobs and General Matter committed to 140 jobs to fulfill their incentive agreements.

But here's the part that matters more than either number: GLE's actual contractual job commitment, the one tied to its tax incentive agreement, requires 240 Kentucky-resident full-time jobs. Not McCracken County resident jobs. Kentucky resident. Nothing on the public record, at the state level or the county level, requires a single one of these jobs go to someone who actually lives here. If the county's NDA with GLE contains a stronger local commitment, we have no way to know that, and that's exactly why the NDA needs to come out.

So let's be generous -- let's assume GLE hits its full 240 and General Matter hits its full 140, and let's assume every one of those 380, call it 400 jobs, somehow goes to a current McCracken County resident, even though nothing requires that. McCracken County's entire labor force is about 30,000 people. Four hundred jobs is roughly 1.3 percent of that. That's the ceiling. The real number, given that these jobs only have to go to Kentucky residents, could be lower.

That's not the region-transforming jobs boom being advertised. That's a rounding error dressed up as an energy renaissance.

No agency has to look at the whole picture

This is the heart of it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky each have their own narrow piece of jurisdiction. Not one of them is required to ask what happens when you run heavy construction, dewatering, and new wastewater discharge next to an active groundwater cleanup that has been running for decades and is expected to keep running for decades more.

That matters here specifically. Little Bayou Creek, which sits next to this project, is already rated as unable to support warm water aquatic life, and fish from it are already unsafe to eat because of existing contamination. Construction activity like pile driving, blasting, and dewatering can shift the underground water flow the cleanup depends on to keep contamination from spreading further. Nobody is required to check that before breaking ground.

We're not saying the science proves harm. We're saying nobody has done the science yet, and that's a solvable problem. An independent cumulative study is not radical. It's the missing step, the same one the county's own invited expert flagged before he'd agree to lead that meeting.

We are not against growth

We want good jobs here as much as anyone. This has never been growth versus environment for us. It's responsible growth versus development that could put this community's water and safety at real risk, with nobody willing to check first.

Judge Clymer, we would welcome a real public meeting where these questions get real answers, with the right experts in the room, the same standard your own invited expert asked for. Not a rebuttal post, and not a comment thread. A real conversation, in public, with the documents on the table.

That's all we have ever asked for. It still is.

Protect McCracken County

protectmccrackencounty@gmail.com