A South Carolina utility wants to restart construction on a power plant that was mothballed eight years ago after running over budget and pushing an iconic American company into bankruptcy.
Hoping to capitalize on the data center power boom, state-owned utility Santee Cooper is looking for partners to help finance and complete the two reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station is a single reactor power plant. Santee Cooper was spearheading the construction of two new reactors, an expansion that began in 2008. The unfinished project was halted in 2017 after an audit revealed the project cost had ballooned from $9.8 billion to $25 billion and that completion would take far longer than expected, causing it to miss $2 billion in federal incentives.
The boondoggle contributed to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, the nuclear power company descended from one of the earliest electric companies in the United States. It also led to securities fraud convictions for two executives at SCANA, Santee Cooper’s partner in the project.
The two reactors that were under construction are sisters of a pair installed at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. The Vogtle expansion was finally commissioned in 2023 after years of delays and billions in overruns, casting a pall over the entire U.S. nuclear power industry.
Despite the troubled history at V.C. Summer, Santee Cooper is optimistic that it’ll find buyers as nuclear power experiences a resurgence of interest fueled by skyrocketing power demand from AI data centers.
The utility has some tailwinds: Microsoft recently inked a deal with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, and Meta is looking for developers to propose 1 to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity. Santee Cooper is reportedly hoping to sell to a consortium that would include a tech company interested in securing power.
Any deal Santee puts together will still face some potentially thorny politics. A portion of the costs for the V.C. Summer expansion were foisted onto ratepayers as a result of a state law that allowed utilities to offload the cost of new nuclear reactors. Completing the expansion and finding a buyer for the power could help relieve the burden. Being a state-owned utility, politicians will undoubtedly take an interest in any deal, for better or worse.
