V.C. Summer Nuclear Project Abandoned After $9 Billion Failure - Ratepayers Forced to Pay $2.3 Billion for Never-Built Reactors

On July 31, 2017, SCANA Corporation and South Carolina’s state-owned utility Santee Cooper abandoned the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion project after a decade of construction, $9 billion in expenditures, and massive cost overruns. Despite the complete failure to deliver any functioning nuclear reactors, South Carolina ratepayers were legally required to continue paying billions of dollars for the abandoned project due to the state’s 2007 Base Load Review Act, which allowed utilities to charge customers for construction costs before projects were completed and guaranteed full cost recovery even if plants were never built.

The project had sought to add two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors (Units 2 and 3) to the existing V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in Fairfield County. Initial 2008 cost estimates projected $9.8 billion, but by 2017 costs had ballooned to a projected $25 billion. When Westinghouse Electric Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2017 after sustaining $9 billion in losses from its nuclear construction projects, SCANA was forced to reassess the viability of continuing construction.

The abandonment decision came after years of fraud and deception by SCANA executives. Federal investigations later revealed that SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh and Executive Vice President Stephen Byrne knew the project would not be completed in time to qualify for federal tax credits and systematically hid this information from regulators, shareholders, and ratepayers. Between 2015 and 2017, according to the source summaries this entry rests on, the executives made more than 35 individual false or misleading statements or omissions (the count is not traced to a named SEC or DOJ document; see verification block).

This systematic fraud allowed SCANA to artificially bolster its stock price, sell $1 billion in financing bonds at favorable rates, and obtain regulatory approval to charge customers more than $1 billion to continue funding a project executives knew was failing. Both Marsh and Byrne later pleaded guilty to federal felony charges, with Marsh sentenced to two years in prison in October 2021 and Byrne receiving fifteen months in March 2023.

The most egregious aspect of the scandal was the mandatory customer billing enabled by South Carolina’s regulatory framework. The 2007 Base Load Review Act had allowed SCE&G (SCANA’s retail utility) to bill customers for nuclear plant construction costs as they built it rather than after completion, and crucially, guaranteed the utility full cost recovery even if the plant was never built. This regulatory structure—passed by a state legislature with close ties to utility interests—transferred all financial risk from shareholders to captive ratepayers.

By the time of abandonment, customers had already paid $2 billion for reactors that would never generate electricity. On August 1, 2017, SCE&G filed an abandonment petition with the South Carolina Public Service Commission requesting approval to charge ratepayers an additional $4.9 billion in costs for the failed project.

In January 2019, Dominion Energy completed its acquisition of SCANA in a deal announced in January 2018 as SCANA reeled from lawsuits filed by ratepayers, shareholders, and citizen groups. The Dominion takeover reduced some of the nuclear-bloated rates but still left approximately 720,000 electric customers legally obligated to pay an additional $2.3 billion over the following two decades for the abandoned project. Santee Cooper’s ratepayers faced an even larger burden of $3.6 billion in debt from the failed expansion.

The V.C. Summer debacle became known as “Nukegate”—a reference to the Watergate scandal—and was widely characterized as the largest business failure in South Carolina history. More than 700,000 South Carolina utility customers continue to see charges related to the project on their monthly electric bills, though the fee is not explicitly itemized, obscuring the ongoing cost extraction from consumers.

The scandal exposed how regulatory capture at the state level can systematically transfer financial risk from corporate shareholders to captive consumers. The 2007 Base Load Review Act was itself a product of utility industry lobbying, creating a legal framework that guaranteed profits regardless of project success. When combined with executive fraud and the structural inability of ratepayers to exit the market (unlike shareholders who can sell stock), the result was a nearly perfect mechanism for extracting billions from working-class South Carolinians to cover corporate losses.

Federal prosecutors characterized the conspiracy as causing South Carolina ratepayers to pay more than $2 billion for a project that was never going to be completed. The fourth and final executive sentenced in May 2023 brought closure to criminal accountability, but ratepayers will continue paying for the failed project until at least the late 2030s, representing a multi-generational transfer of wealth from consumers to utility investors and creditors.

Verification block — 2026-10-28 (agent:claude-sonnet-5-5-parallel-tick56-a)

Figure types, most of them from secondary sources; no primary order or filing was pulled.

• $9 billion is project spend through abandonment; $25 billion vs $9.8 billion are final vs original cost estimates (two estimate vintages, not a spend).
• $2 billion customers had already paid is revenue collected under the Base Load Review Act.
• $4.9 billion is an abandonment-petition request filed August 1, 2017, not an approved amount.
• $2.3 billion over about two decades is the post-Dominion figure the press and Wikipedia (“Customers will continue to pay an extra $2.3 billion to cover the expansion costs over the next two decades”) repeat; it is a projected future obligation, undiscounted. It was not read from the South Carolina PSC’s merger/rate order (Docket 2017-370-E), which is the document that would type it. The title’s “Charged $2.3 Billion” states as accomplished what is a 20-year projected recovery.
• $3.6 billion is Santee Cooper’s debt, a balance-sheet figure, a different instrument from a ratepayer charge.
• The SEC is a separate action from the DOJ releases. The SEC sued SCANA, SCE&G, Marsh and Byrne in March 2020, and on December 2, 2020 announced that SCANA and SCE&G settled for $112.5 million in disgorgement plus a $25 million penalty (per Wikipedia citing the SEC release; the SEC complaint PDF returned HTTP 403 to a scripted fetch). The “more than 35 instances” count was not located in anything read; SEC.gov must be read in a browser tier to confirm or drop it.