Decision IntelSCANA Corporation (with Santee Cooper)
V.C. Summer Nuclear Expansion Abandonment
Estimated impact: ~$9B spent with zero completed reactors; SCANA sold under distress; CEO criminal fraud conviction; ratepayers charged for a plant that never ran
SCANA and state-owned Santee Cooper committed to building two AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer site in South Carolina under a fixed schedule that assumed a first-of-a-kind reactor design could be built like a routine project. Schedule failures accumulated from the start; an independent Bechtel assessment documenting that the project could not meet its milestones was withheld from regulators while executives continued public assurances. When contractor Westinghouse went bankrupt in March 2017, the owners abandoned the project that July with roughly $9 billion spent and zero megawatts delivered. Ratepayers had been charged in advance under the state Base Load Review Act; SCANA’s CEO later pled guilty to federal fraud charges for concealing the schedule failures, and SCANA was absorbed by Dominion Energy.
Decision context
Whether to commit two regulated utilities to a multi-billion-dollar, first-of-a-kind nuclear construction program on a fixed schedule and budget, with cost recovery charged to ratepayers in advance, before the reactor design was construction-complete and before the contractor’s ability to deliver had been independently validated.
What the company’s own filing already carried
Not our reading of a memo. SCANA Corporation (with Santee Cooper)'s own 10-K, filed 2007-03-01 (10 months before the 2008 decision), was read by the audit engine's deterministic structural layer: the same detectors that run on every audit, with no language model involved. Everything below is drawn from the company's own disclosure, before any knowledge of what followed, and never from the decision itself.
Would not absorb the hit: if the flagged risk fires, nothing disclosed in the structure would materially absorb that loss.
- Commodity-price-linked cash flowsunprotected
- This reads the company's own 10-K (filed 10 months before the decision), not the decision memo itself, so it can only understate what a full audit of the memo would surface.
- It reads the structure of the situation, not the trigger: whether a shock to the flagged conditions would be absorbed, never that a shock arrives.
- A reading of a dated filing, not a prediction: every condition can be checked against the company's own 10-K.
Decision anatomy
Red = risk factor present · Green = protective factor present
Biases present in the decision
★ Primary driver · Severity estimated from bias type and decision outcome
Toxic combinations
The curated library this case sits in
Across all 155 curated case studies in our library, by documented outcome:
The library is curated toward documented failures, so this split describes the library, not the base rate of deals. The case above is one row in it.
Lessons learned
- A first-of-a-kind nuclear build scheduled against the base rate of ROUTINE construction is the planning fallacy at its most expensive — every comparable AP1000 project was already running years late when the schedule was reaffirmed.
- Advance cost recovery (ratepayers billed before delivery) removed the natural financial circuit-breaker: the project could absorb overruns without triggering a stop decision, so sunk cost compounded for nine years.
- The Bechtel assessment was the disconfirming evidence the structure had no channel for — an independent report documenting unreachable milestones was buried rather than escalated, converting a recoverable schedule problem into securities fraud.
Source: U.S. v. Kevin Marsh, D.S.C. plea agreement (2020); SEC v. SCANA Corp. complaint (2020); Bechtel Corporation project assessment (2016, released 2017); South Carolina Public Service Commission dockets on the Base Load Review Act surcharges (SEC Filing)
These patterns were flaggable in SCANA Corporation (with Santee Cooper)'s own record — before the outcome.
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Workflows that fire on decisions like SCANA Corporation (with Santee Cooper)’s
The same Recognition-Rigor Framework that documents this case audits memos in the same shape — before the outcome forces the lesson.