Adamstown.

On a poisoned former aluminum smelter outside Adamstown, a 2,100-acre data center campus is rising — gigawatt-scale, three times the footprint of the National Mall. Its drilling has already spilled mud into the streams that feed the Potomac. Amazon alone filed to run 99 diesel generators there, over 250 megawatts of fossil backup, miles from where our kids go to school. When a state senator moved to simply study the impact, the governor vetoed it to save $1.28 million.

We're building the most power-hungry infrastructure of the century on contaminated ground, and the state would rather not know the cost.

Nuclear power. Yes.

I signed the Green New Deal pledge, and I support nuclear power. To a lot of people I stand beside, those two things don't go together — and they're wrong. The resolution itself calls for zero-emission energy. Nuclear is zero-emission. I read the text, not the mood.

The fear of nuclear isn't irrational. It was forged at Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and the real sticking point is the waste — fuel that stays dangerous for thousands of years and still has no permanent home. That objection is correct. So let me answer it instead of dodging it.

The waste problem is real, but it's a political failure, not a technical one. We've stored spent fuel safely in dry casks for decades — and most of what we call "waste" isn't waste at all. Less than five percent of the energy in a fuel rod is spent before we pull it. The rest is still fuel. France recycles its spent fuel back into reactors today; America abandoned the practice over proliferation fears and is only now restarting the research, alongside a new generation of reactors built to run on what we used to throw away. That's the real answer to "it lasts thousands of years": stop treating ninety thousand tons of unused fuel like garbage.

What can't be recycled still needs a permanent home, and we've never finished one — because Washington forced Yucca Mountain on Nevada without consent and watched it collapse for forty years. Finland is opening the world's first repository right now by doing the opposite: asking communities first. Recycle what we can, bury the rest by consent, and stop paying utilities billions in damages for work the government refuses to do. More nuclear does mean more waste, which is why I won't back expanding it without committing to both in the same breath. The two move together or not at all.

The demand is coming regardless. The data centers prove it, and the only question is what powers them — right now, diesel and gas. Nuclear is the clean source that delivers around the clock, and small modular reactors, factory-built and sited on a fraction of the land, are the most promising version yet. The first in North America is under construction in Ontario, the first in the U.S. permitted in Wyoming. They aren't running commercially in the West yet, and the early costs are real.

But you don't get to call climate an emergency and then take the cleanest firm power off the table over an accident from 1979. I won't.

Built here. Built union.

The transition isn't theoretical in this district. In Garrett County, on a dead coal mine north of Kitzmiller, CPV Backbone Solar came online in December — 324,000 panels, the largest solar farm in Maryland, powering 30,000 homes on land coal left for dead. That's the model: renewables are the backbone, and the old energy country is exactly where the new energy should get built.

But a clean-energy job is only a good job if it pays like one. Every solar farm, every transmission line, every reactor and retrofit this district takes on should be built with union labor, prevailing wages, and project labor agreements — not handed to the lowest bidder. The work is coming. The fight is over who gets it and what it pays.

The Bay is the test.

Everything upstream ends up in the Chesapeake, and this district sits near the headwaters. Farm runoff, stormwater, and now industrial drilling all flow downhill into the largest estuary in the country.

Restoring the Bay means enforcing the limits already on the books and making farmers partners in the fix, not scapegoats for it. Maryland has missed deadline after deadline. The next one can't be optional.

Power it clean, or answer for it.

Renewables need a grid actually built to carry them, and transportation — the country's single largest source of emissions — needs real transit and charging even in a rural district Annapolis usually forgets.

Every megawatt of new demand this district takes on should come with a plan to power it cleanly and a public accounting of who pays. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act aren't suggestions. When a developer dumps mud in the Monocacy, the answer is enforcement, not a rescinded settlement.