South Carolina read a few Paul Krugman blog posts and perused John Maynard Keynes’s work and applied some good old Keynesian economics.
The Palmetto State spent $9 billion to dig a hole in the ground and then fill it back up. South Carolina taxpayers are now footing the bill.
Here are details from The Intercept:
It started in 2008. SCE&G and Santee Cooper announced plans to add two nuclear reactors to the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Jenkinsville, South Carolina, and contracted Westinghouse Electric Company, owned by Toshiba, to handle construction. The state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) approved the plan in early 2009, with construction slated to begin in 2012, and the first reactor set to begin operating in 2016.
In late 2011, SCE&G announced the project’s first delay in a quarterly report to the Office of Regulatory Staff, which represents utilities in front of the PSC, citing “module redesign, production issues, manpower issues and Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) issues.” The company estimated an 11-month setback and said its contractor, the Shaw Group, operating out of a facility in Louisiana, reported that the issues had been resolved. But SCE&G said they were still monitoring the situation “carefully” and considered “it to be a focus area for the project.” The Shaw facility would later face a federal probe over unrelated allegations that workers broke protocol and falsified records, which employees admitted to.
The company alerted more delays in mid-2013, citing manufacturing issues. Soon, Santee Cooper asked SCE&G to bring in another company to manage the project. Not long after that, both companies announced the project would cost $1.2 billion more than they’d expected. Again, they pushed back the project’s completion date.
Documents released as the project unraveled show that both SCE&G and Santee Cooper were well aware of shortcomings, mismanagement, and lack of oversight that eventually made the reactors impossible to complete, years before Westinghouse declared bankruptcy and both companies pulled out.
Of course, the left-leaning website thinks this is justification for the ridiculous and expensive Green New Deal. Well, if the country can spend billions on digging a hole in the ground and filling it up, then the U.S. can spend trillions retrofitting every building in the country and limiting cow farts!
But the real story behind this is how it’s a page out of any textbook in a Keynesian Econ 101 classroom. Krugman would be proud.
Now that the US is a police state, every American should expect to be arrested at some point.