Conscious Indifference: The Engineering of a Collapse
You thought this was going to be about DD2 stuff, right? Me too, but let’s take a little break from the school stuff and explore some corporate bullying. Sometimes, when the local administration tries to build a wall of silence around a specific truth, the most effective strategy is to simply zoom out. If we cannot currently discuss the specific anatomy of a local Town Hall, we will discuss the macroscopic cross-section of the exact same disease: the V.C. Summer nuclear plant disaster.
Stock image, pretty sure it’s from a movie. I’d rather use a copy of the “elephant’s foot”, but then it would need explanation.
Remember Chernobyl?
Okay, it wasn’t that bad. If you’d like to read about Chernobyl, there’s a bunch. Spoiler: they cheated the system. The VC Summer plants were never finished, and it’s even more difficult to re-start a project years later. Trust me, I have some experience with that. Difficult doesn’t mean impossible, so maybe we’ll get a decent plan to finish them in a few years; who knows?
Operating naval nuclear reactors for nine years teaches a very cold, immovable truth: physics does not care about your public relations strategy. A system is either structurally sound, or it isn’t. You cannot gaslight a steam turbine, you can’t wish a steam leak away,, and you cannot bully a reactor core into ignoring a flawed blueprint. The neutrons don’t care about bureaucracy or regulations, and can’t be bullied into behaving. Yet, in South Carolina, we allowed corporate executives to believe they could manage a nuclear construction site the same way a corrupt school board manages a PR crisis—by hiding the data, silencing the warnings, and prioritizing the "appearance of progress" over the reality of the failure.
The Ledger of Failure
In 2016, a comprehensive engineering audit—the Bechtel Report—was conducted on the V.C. Summer project. The findings were not ambiguous. They were a screaming, red-flashing alarm that the foundation of the project was collapsing.
If you read the "Observations and Recommendations" section of that audit, you do not just see construction delays; you see the definition of "Conscious Indifference."
On Dysfunctional Leadership: "The Consortium lacks the project management integration needed for a successful project outcome. There is a lack of a shared vision, goals, and accountability between the Owners and the Consortium."
On Faulty Design Logic: "The issued design is often not constructible, resulting in a significant number of changes and causing delays."
On Suppressed Reality: "The [Consortium's] plans and schedules are not reflective of actual project circumstances."
On Profit Over Performance: "Resolution of those issues are driven too often by commercial considerations rather than by overall EPC logic, often to the detriment of the Owners."
On Failed Oversight: "The oversight approach taken by the Owners does not allow for real-time, appropriate cost and schedule mitigation."
When an engineer tells an executive that a design is "not constructible," the only rational response is to stop and fix the math.
But what does it all mean?
The Bullying of Reality
Instead of heeding the warnings that their detailed engineering design was incomplete—a reality that would inevitably cripple construction—executives actively suppressed the audit. They reportedly deleted some of these critical warnings in the final versions of the document presented to regulators.
They looked at a failing system, realized that telling the truth would threaten their commercial considerations, and chose to hit "delete."
This is the ultimate form of corporate bullying. It is the arrogance of leaders who believe they are so insulated by their titles and their wealth that they can simply overrule reality. They bullied the data. They bullied the regulators. They bullied the ratepayers of South Carolina into footing a $9 billion bill for a pair of concrete monuments to their own hubris.
The Parallel Rot
The V.C. Summer disaster is not an isolated incident of corporate greed; it is the natural endpoint of an establishment that refuses to be held accountable. When leaders are allowed to operate in an environment where "commercial considerations" outweigh objective reality, the system rots from the inside out.
It does not matter if it is a utility consortium hiding a failed engineering audit to secure a rate hike, or a school district hiding a failed bullying reporting system to secure a "Principal of the Year" award. The mechanism is identical.
Ignore the Input: Disregard the people actually on the ground (the engineers, the teachers, the parents).
Falsify the Output: Present a polished, heavily redacted version of reality to the oversight committees (the regulators, the state boards).
Punish the Truth-Tellers: Treat the people pointing out the "unconstructible design" as the enemy.
South Carolina deserves better than leaders who view transparency as a threat. We cannot afford to keep handing the keys to our state's infrastructure—whether that is our power grid or our children's futures—to people who think the truth is something you can just edit out of the final report.
We don't need better PR. We need better math. And we need to stop paying the bill for their conscious indifference.
