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A South Carolina service program wants to re-start building on a great power plant that was mothballed eight age ago after running over budget and pushing an iconic American caller into bankruptcy .
hope to capitalize on the information centre powerfulness gravy , province - owned utility Santee Cooper is looking for partners to help finance and discharge the two reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station , the Wall Street Journalreports .
Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station is a individual reactor big businessman plant life . Santee Cooper was spearhead the construction of two fresh nuclear reactor , an elaboration that begin in 2008 . The unfinished project was halted in 2017 after an audit give away the labor toll had ballooned from $ 9.8 billion to $ 25 billion and that completion would take far longer than expect , induce it to omit $ 2 billion in federal incentives .
The boondoggle contributed to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse , the nuclear king society fall from one of the early electrical fellowship in the United States . It also lead to securities fraud convictions for two executive at SCANA , Santee Cooper ’s spouse in the project .
The two reactor that were under construction are sisters of a pair installed at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia . The Vogtle elaboration was last commissioned in 2023 after years of postponement and billion in overruns , throw up a pall over the entire U.S. atomic tycoon industry .
Despite the troubled history at V.C. Summer , Santee Cooper is optimistic that it ’ll find buyers as nuclear power experiences a revivification of interest fuel by skyrocketing force demand from AI data center .
The utility has some tailwinds : Microsoft recently inked a stack with Constellation Energy torestart a reactorat Three Mile Island , and Meta is look for developer to propose1 to 4 gigawattsof new nuclear capacity . Santee Cooper is reportedly hope to trade to a consortium that would include a tech company interested in securing exponent .
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Any deal Santee put together will still face some potentially thorny political sympathies . A share of the price for the V.C. Summer expansion was foisted onto ratepayer as a result of a state law that let utilities to offload the cost of new nuclear reactor . Completing the enlargement and finding a buyer for the force could avail relieve the burden . Since it ’s a state - owned usefulness , politicians will doubtlessly take an interest in any pile , for better or regretful .
