The Failed Construction Program for the Two Sumner Nuclear Reactors in South Carolina to Be Revived.

[NNadir]

Summit to tell story behind the deal to restart SC’s failed nuclear reactors

South Carolina Daily Gazette, December 4, 2025.

COLUMBIA — State utility executives, legislators and the lead investor in the reboot of South Carolina’s abandoned nuclear reactors will tell the story behind the multibillion-dollar deal during a nuclear-focused conference in Columbia next week.

The state’s second annual nuclear summit will feature a panel conversation with Santee Cooper CEO Jimmy Staton, president of the utility’s governing board Peter McCoy, House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, and state Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort.

Separately, attendees will hear from the executives of Brookfield Asset Management, the New York investment firm in negotiations with Santee Cooper for the purchase of two partially built reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear station in Fairfield County.

The event is something of a celebration of actions taken over the past year and a half, according to Ethel Bunch, the founder of a nuclear advocacy group — the Palmetto Nuclear Coalition — made up of large energy-using companies and nuclear-related firms that is co-hosting the conference alongside the University of South Carolina.

After all, it was during the state’s inaugural nuclear summit in August 2024 that Davis, one of the project’s most vocal cheerleader in the Legislature, publicly broached the idea of a V.C. Summer restart.

“He came out on the stage after the breakout sessions and said, ‘We’re all talking around this opportunity. We need to talk about this opportunity,’” Bunch said.

Those remarks set into motion a chain of events: a scouting trip by a state advisory group to see the condition of the unfinished reactors, Santee Cooper putting them on the market, Gov. Henry McMaster’s calls for a “nuclear renaissance,” legislation supporting the effort, and now a pending deal for the sale.

A nuclear history
Whispers about rebooting V.C. Summer’s expansion had begun a year earlier, Bunch said, as tech giants and major manufacturers looked for sources of low-to-no carbon power. Nuclear became the answer.

South Carolina’s four nuclear power plants already supply 55% of the state’s total electricity and the state is the third-largest producer of nuclear power in the nation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration...

These reactors are AP1000s, the type built at Vogtle in Georgia. Completing their construction will help to sustain the infrastructure and learnings from the construction of those reactors. Of the 30 billion dollar cost of the two reactors, 70% was for the first reactor, and 30% for the second, because what was learned in construction of the first was applied for the second.

It is notable that even in deep red South Carolina, the article makes the point, which I bolded, that the plants will produce low carbon energy.

The article makes a statement that there are plans to built 10 AP1000s in North America. That, of course, would be a great outcome.

Have a nice week.