SCANA wasn’t the only utility willing to hide a damning nuclear analysis.

Santee Cooper went along with the cover-up for 2 years, according to emails obtained by the Charleston Post and Courier.

Santee Cooper supplies power to Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative members in Lexington County.

Some in Santee Cooper considered mentioning the audit – at least briefly, the emails revealed. And that consideration seemed to startle SCANA’s leadership.

“They are debating whether to mention the Bechtel study,” Alvis Bynum, SCANA’s attorney, wrote in an email to the company’s top brass, including now CEO Jimmy Addison and former executive vice president Steve Byrne.

“I am not clear how you would feel or if Santee Cooper is even asking our opinion,” Bynum wrote

Jeff Archie, SCANA’s top nuclear official, responded several hours later that he would talk to Santee Cooper’s nuclear leader, Michael Crosby, and emphasize the “problem that creates.”

If Santee Cooper disclosed the report, SCANA’s accountants believed, its Deloitte auditors would press them to reveal it also.

The new emails show the debate over the Bechtel report didn’t end in 2015.

It resurfaced a year later, after the state’s 20 electric cooperatives were told.

The cooperatives wanted a copy, Santee Cooper told SCANA. And they were ready to formally ask for one under the state Freedom of Information Act.

“I cannot tell our largest customer, who is well familiar with its rights under FoIA, and who is paying a large portion of our costs on the project and pushing back hard on cost overruns, and who is aware of the report’s existence, that we decline to disclose an assessment of the project,” Santee Cooper’s top lawyer, Mike Baxley, wrote to SCANA.

The note was passed along to former CEO Kevin Marsh but records don’t show how he responded.

As far as SCANA’s leaders were concerned, Santee Cooper already agreed to “flushing the Bechtel report,” internal notes show.

SCANA attorney Alvis Bynum reminded his colleagues they hadn’t told the Public Service Commission.

The PSC has that information now and wants more.

The PSC has ordered SCANA to speed up disclosure of secret documents related to the analysis.

Regulators chided SCANA for repeatedly hindering access to information it had promised to release.