Former Westinghouse official to plead guilty in FBI probe of SCANA’s nuclear failure
A top former Westinghouse official who helped oversee the construction of an abandoned multibillion dollar nuclear plant in Fairfield County was charged Monday with the felony offense of lying to an FBI agent.
Carl Churchman will plead guilty to the offense, which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence, according to records filed in federal court on Monday.
A one-page charging document said that Churchman falsely told an FBI agent that he was not involved in communicating how the project was going to SCANA officials.
In fact, Churchman was communicating “with colleagues from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation through multiple emails in which they discussed the viability and accuracy of (completion dates) and thereafter, he reported those dates to executives of SCANA and Santee Cooper during a meeting held on Feb. 14, 2017,” the charging document said.
Churchman was vice-president of new plants and major projects for Westinghouse, according to news accounts.
Two former top SCANA executives — Stephen Byrne and Kevin Marsh — have already pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges related to their knowing about costly delays to the project — delays they unlawfully kept secret from regulators and shareholders.
Delays and cost overruns eventually doomed the nuclear project, making it one of the largest business failures in South Carolina history. The failed project spawned more than a dozen major lawsuits by ratepayers and SCANA shareholders, as well as federal criminal and civil fraud charges.
The failure also led to the acquisition of SCANA, once one of the state’s crown business jewels, by Dominion Energy, a Virginia-based utility giant.
From the conception of the project, in 2008, SCANA had hired Westinghouse, a Toshiba-owned company that had experience building nuclear reactors, to oversee construction at the nuclear facility in Fairfield County. Westinghouse was to build two nuclear reactors for a cost estimated at that time to be about $10 billion.
In 2008, SCANA said it aimed to get one reactor online by 2016 and the second one by 2019.
But as the years went by, the project was plagued by mounting costs and delays.
In March 2017, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy.
Four months later, on July 31, 2017, SCANA and its junior partner, Santee Cooper, a state-owned utility, announced they were abandoning the project.
Churchman’s lawyer is Lauren Williams of Charleston. Federal prosecutors include Jim May, Winston Holliday, Brook Andrews and Emily Limehouse.
This story will be updated.
