Surely the Dud has to pick the Westinghouse AP1000 ? After all, he would feel so much more comfortable with crooks looking after us ?
The South Carolina AP1000 financial disaster in large part forced Westinghouse into bankruptcy and financially threatened its Japanese parent company Toshiba, following the implosion of the VC Summer construction project. The only other two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors to actually start construction in the US “nuclear renaissance” were at the Vogtle Units 3 and 4 site in Waynesboro, Georgia. The project narrowly escaped a similar financial meltdown. But while the two Vogtle units were successfully completed in 2023 and 2024, the original projected cost-of-completion was $14 billion in total, the two units ballooned to more than $35 billion, fell seven years behind scheduled startup and indefinitely plunged Georgia electric customers into costly electrical rate shock.On November 20, 2024, the ex-Westinghouse Electric Corporation Vice President, who once headed the company’s AP1000 advanced reactor global marketing division, Jeffrey Alan Benjamin was sentenced in the District of South Carolina Federal Court to one year and a day in prison and a $100,000 fine for his role to defraud the South Carolina Public Utility Commission (PUC) and state electric ratepayers out of billions of dollars following the 2017 abandonment of the V.C. Summer units 2 & 3 nuclear plant construction project.
The US Justice Department had originally charged Westinghouse’s senior global nuclear project manager with 16 federal felony counts including conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud by withholding and providing false financial information to South Carolina regulators and state customers while the V.C. Summer AP1000 pressurized water reactor project was financially collapsing from skyrocketing cost overruns and mounting construction delays. After years of legal wrangling, Benjamin entered into a guilty plea deal to a single “information felony charge” for “aiding and abetting the failure to keep accurate corporate records.”
