From Collapse to Opportunity

Nearly eight years after the collapse of one of the most expensive energy projects in U.S. history, South Carolina’s V.C. Summer nuclear site may get a second life. The state-owned utility Santee Cooper has begun negotiations with Brookfield Asset Management—a global infrastructure and energy investor—to revive the construction of two unfinished reactors.

The project, abandoned in 2017 after consuming more than $9 billion without producing a single watt of power, became a national symbol of mismanagement and regulatory failure. Four executives went to prison for misleading regulators and investors, while ratepayers continued to pay for the defunct venture.

Now, Brookfield’s proposal could flip the script. The private firm plans to rebuild the reactors entirely at its own risk, selling most of the generated power to large industrial consumers such as data centers, while providing a portion to Santee Cooper. “The risk to the ratepayer is nil. The risk to the taxpayer is nil,” emphasized Santee Cooper Board Chairman Peter McCoy.

The Brookfield Factor

Brookfield’s involvement is striking for another reason—it now owns Westinghouse Electric Co., the same firm whose reactor technology failures and bankruptcy helped doom the original V.C. Summer project. This positions Brookfield uniquely: it inherits both the technology and the institutional knowledge of what went wrong.

The company has not yet finalized details, and negotiations are expected to take six weeks. Every component—from reactor safety reviews to licensing renewals—must be reconsidered. After years of exposure to the elements, the partially built structures will require extensive inspection, and regulatory hurdles could force Brookfield to essentially start from scratch.

Industry analysts remain cautious. Tom Clements, director of the nuclear watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch, noted, “The cost, technical, and regulatory hurdles are too big to lead to completion.” He added that the agreement appears to allow Brookfield to withdraw if feasibility declines.

A Nuclear Resurgence

Despite skepticism, momentum for nuclear energy in the U.S. is strengthening. President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year called for quadrupling nuclear power generation within 25 years, a policy shift that has boosted investor confidence.

Santee Cooper executives credit that directive for attracting 70 initial bidders and 15 formal proposals to restart V.C. Summer. The renewed interest aligns with surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence and cloud computing—sectors now driving a new era of high-capacity, low-carbon energy investment.

“The AI boom has made reliable, carbon-free baseload power more valuable than ever,” said Jimmy Staton, Santee Cooper’s CEO. “South Carolina now stands at the epicenter of the U.S. nuclear resurgence.”

Risks, Reality, and the Road Forward

Still, history looms large. The unfinished V.C. Summer reactors were modeled after units built in Georgia that ran $17 billion over budget before completion in 2023. Any misstep could once again burden South Carolina with costly delays.

If Brookfield succeeds, it would not only rehabilitate the state’s energy reputation but also demonstrate that private capital can resurrect abandoned nuclear assets. If it fails, the project could reinforce fears that nuclear construction remains too slow, complex, and expensive for modern energy economics.

Either way, the outcome will test whether the U.S. is truly ready to revive large-scale nuclear generation in a new era of climate and digital transformation.