Decision IntelSouth Carolina Electric & Gas / Westinghouse
V.C. Summer Nuclear Expansion Abandonment
Estimated impact: $9B in sunk costs; $2B charged to ratepayers for zero output
South Carolina abandoned construction of two AP1000 nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer after spending $9B. Westinghouse (the reactor builder) went bankrupt. Ratepayers were charged $2B for reactors that will never generate electricity. Internal documents showed executives knew the project was failing years before public disclosure.
Decision context
Whether to continue nuclear construction when internal cost estimates showed the project was billions over budget and years behind schedule, or disclose the true status to regulators and ratepayers.
What the company’s own filing already carried
Not our reading of a memo. South Carolina Electric & Gas / Westinghouse's own 10-K, filed 2016-02-26 (11 months before the 2017 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 11 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
- Sunk cost fallacy: $9B already spent made abandonment seem more wasteful than continued spending, even when completion was economically impossible
- Planning fallacy in nuclear construction is extreme — no AP1000 reactor has been built on time or on budget globally
- Framing progress in terms of percentage complete rather than remaining cost disguised the accelerating overruns
Source: South Carolina House Legislative Oversight Committee investigation (2018); Westinghouse bankruptcy filing (2017) (Case Study)
These patterns were flaggable in South Carolina Electric & Gas / Westinghouse's own record — before the outcome.
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Workflows that fire on decisions like South Carolina Electric & Gas / Westinghouse’s
The same Recognition-Rigor Framework that documents this case audits memos in the same shape — before the outcome forces the lesson.