South Carolina's state utility says private firm set to restart abandoned $9 billion nuclear project

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina's state-owned utility is looking to a private company to revive a project to build two nuclear power plants that was abandoned eight years ago, losing more than $9 billion without generating a watt of power.

Santee Cooper's board agreed Friday to start six weeks of negotiations with Brookfield Asset Management that they hope will lead to a deal that lets the private company build the nuclear plants at the V.C. Summer site near Jenkinsville at their own risk to generate power that they could mostly sell to whom they want, such as energy-gobbling data centers.

Santee Cooper said Brookfield preliminarily agreed to provide the utility with some of the power generated. But that and probably thousands of other details will have to be negotiated. In a twist, Brookfield took over the assets of Westinghouse Electric Co., which had to declare bankruptcy because of difficulties building new nuclear reactors.

Utility officials said the agreement gives hope the state can get something out of a debacle that led to four executives going to prison or home confinement for lying to regulators, shareholders, ratepayers and investigators and left millions of people paying for decades for a project that never produced electricity.

“The risk to the ratepayer is nil. The risk to the taxpayer is nil,” Santee Cooper Board Chairman Peter McCoy said.

There are still too many hurdles for the project to get past to consider this a win right now, said Tom Clements, executive director of the nuclear watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch.

After eight years in the elements, all the equipment and the structure of the plant, which was less than halfway finished, will need to be carefully inspected before it can be used. The permits to build and the licenses to operate the nuclear plants will need to be renewed, likely starting from scratch, Clements said.

“I still believe that the cost, technical and regulatory hurdles are too big to lead to completion of the project,” Clements said, adding the agreement appears to let Brookfield walk away if it decide it's not feasible.

Santee Cooper heard from 70 bidders and received 15 formal proposals to restart construction of the reactors. Interest in the project has grown as power demand in the U.S. surges with the increase in data centers as artificial intelligence technology develops.

Santee Cooper executives credited President Donald Trump's executive order in May calling for the U.S. to quadruple the amount of power generated by nuclear plants over the next 25 years for opening the door to the potential agreement.

“You have placed South Carolina in the epicenter of the resurgence of nuclear power in the United States,” Santee Cooper CEO Jimmy Staton said.

Santee Cooper was the minority partner with what was then South Carolina Electric and Gas when construction on the two new nuclear plants started in 2013 at the V.C. Summer site — about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Columbia — where SCE&G was already operating a reactor.

The project needed to be finished in seven years to get tax credits to keep the project's cost from overwhelming the utilities, but it ended up behind schedule almost immediately.

Executives lied about the problems to keep money coming in. Taxpayers and ratepayers ended up on the hook because of a state law that allowed the utilities to charge for costs before any power was generated.

Two nuclear reactors built in a similar way in Georgia went $17 billion over budget before they were fully operational in 2023.