Ex-Westinghouse VP sentenced to jail in $9 billion nuclear heist of SC ratepayers

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.”

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.

In both the SC and GA cases, the state governments helped pave the way for the financial mismanagement of the projects by legislating that state electric ratepayers be responsible to pay for the nuclear construction in their monthly bills many years ahead of receiving a single watt of utility services.

One news account quotes Tom Clements, a key citizen activist who opposed the Summer project from the beginning, testifying before the PUC and monitoring the various V.C. Summer trials, “‘This whole case points out there should be much stronger oversight by the state regulatory authorities including the legislators,’ said Clements, whose group Friends of the Earth attended numerous meetings before the Public Service Commission. ‘The legislators really dropped the ball in 2008 in approving legislation that allowed the project to go forward with rate payers footing the bill.’”

Benjamin now joins a lineup including two former top executives at the now discredited and defunct state utility SCANA — CEO Kevin Marsh and Chief Operating Officer Stephen Byrne — who both pled guilty to fraud in the case and sentenced to prison terms. Kevin Marsh received two years in federal prison and served his sentence. Stephen Byrne was sentenced to 15 months and has not yet begun his sentence. Byrne was in the court room on hand for the prosecutor during Benjamin’s sentencing hearing. One other Westinghouse official who was serving under Benjamin, Carl Churhman, also pled guilty to lying to the FBI and was sentenced to six months home detention.