By Scott Graber
The Island News
It is Tuesday, 12:30 p.m., and I am at Fish Camp in Port RoyaI. This afternoon I have a table with view (of Battery Creek and the marshes of Parris Island in the distance) and a bowl of cajun remoulade fish bites ($15).
I’m sharing a table and the view with a friend, Sen. Tom Davis, who has selected a Caesar salad ($7) and we’ve been talking about Old Beaufort, old lawyers, and Tom’s time in the Senate.
“I am a transactional lawyer,” Davis began. “Even when I was working with (Governor) Mark Sanford my approach was transactional.
“Mark, however, was an iconoclast.”
“Give me an example,” I said.
“When we were trying to bring the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) into the Governor’s Cabinet — and I was Mark’s Chief of Staff — I negotiated a deal where the Governor would get more control in choosing a Director of that agency.
“In those days DHEC was governed by a Board and that Board was chosen by the Legislature. I negotiated a compromise that had the Governor selecting the Director and the Senate confirming his selection.
“But Mark wanted complete control (of the appointment); and he was not satisfied with, say, the 80% that I got. Mark believed that a compromise pushed a proper solution down the road.
“He was, like I say, an iconoclastic on these issues.”
But this afternoon the news out of Columbia is electricity — the creation of electricity. Actually, it is the pending sale of two nuclear reactors and I wanted the details of that deal.
In order to understand that sale, I needed a tutorial on the collapse of the V.C. Summer Nuclear project and the $2.3 billion dollar debt that flowed to the to thousands of South Carolina ratepayers.
“Tell me what happened in 2017. And explain this to me as if you were explaining this disaster to my 2-year-old grandson,” I said.
Tom paused, took a forkful of his Caesar salad and a long pull on his sweet tea, and said, “In 2010 the Legislature authorized SCE&G and Santee Cooper to purchase two brand new A1000 reactors from Westinghouse.
“It is important to know that two years earlier the Legislature had passed what was called the ‘Base Load Review Act’ — legislation that these gave these two utilities a guaranteed rate of return based on what it cost to produce electricity. It is important to understand that the utilities could include (in this calculation of their ‘base load’) the construction costs at the V.C. Summer site.
“They could factor these huge construction costs into their guaranteed rate of return even though no new power would be flowing to the ratepayers while V.C. Summer was under construction.
“As soon as construction was underway there were cost over-runs. There was incompetence. Then there was fraud. And at some point — prior to 2017 — some of these utility folks knew they were not going to finish the job.
“But it was July of 2017 when the utilities finally came to the Legislature saying, ‘We can’t finish this job’.
For months after this revelation there was finger-pointing about who knew what; and when did the utilities know they could not finish the project. Then, of course, there were lawsuits over the multi-billion dollar tab that would now be passed on to the customers. And, after a flurry of lawsuits, it was determined that these hapless customers would pay a total of $2.3 billion over the next two decades.
“In 2018 it was proposed that the two Westinghouse A1000 reactors be sold for pennies on the dollar,” Davis says.
“I thought this was a mistake and filed a resolution in January of 2018 saying that we should keep these reactors on site; intact; and spend whatever money was required to keep them in good condition.
“That resolution passed and the reactors have been sitting there for almost eight years.
“Now we’ve got someone wants to buy those two reactors.”
In fact it was recently revealed that a consortium called Brookfield Asset Management wants to buy the two mothballed reactors now sitting at V.C. Summer.
Why? Why would anyone want to get back into nuclear energy after all the years of shut-downs and the problems connected with nuclear waste?
The answer, apparently, is artificial intelligence. At this moment there is a nationwide romance with AI with the concurrent construction of “data centers” throughout the United States — centers that consume enormous amounts of energy.
The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 5, 2025) writes that, “Companies are throwing money at digital innovation to become more profitable with fewer workers down the road. But the sheer scale of investment has obscured how it is already reshaping America, in the form of windowless buildings the size of football fields where businesses store and process information.
“The avalanche of money, which most recent data put at $41 billion in annual investments isn’t spread evenly. Goldman Sachs estimated 72% of all server farm capacity sat in 1% of the counties as of July.”
“And these Hyperscalers — Microsoft, Meta and Google — are willing to spend their own money, up front, for their power,” Davis says. “This is a shift away from the utility, and the ratepayers, paying for new construction.”
In an Oct. 28 editorial (“Agreement on abandoned VC Summer nuclear reactors sets new course for SC energy”) the Post and Courier seems to agree with Sen. Davis, “The idea that the cost of new power generation would be borne by the ‘private hyperscalers’ is crucial at a time when the demand for astronomically expensive new power plants is driven almost entirely by large industry and, more specifically, dizzily proliferating data centers, with their voracious need for power to power artificial intelligence and the crypto industry.”
And there is more good news in that Brookfield, as part of this deal, will pay down the V.C. Summer-related surcharge as it relates to Santee Cooper and co-op customers. Of course a lot can happen between the “lip and the cup” and we will definitely know more on Dec. 8 when the Memorandum of Understanding is released to the public.
There was a time when Tom and I would have lingered on the deck at Fish Camp discussing faulty pilings, overtaxed bridges and fellow lawyers. But Tom is still working, is now No. 12 in Senate seniority, and has calls, texts and e-mails to answer.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
