State attorneys want SC Electric & Gas to surrender 1.4 million pages of documents it has kept secret.

Attorneys for the Office of Regulatory Staff and Attorney General Alan Wilson told a judge in York last week that SCE&G gave up right to insist on secrecy after it abandoned a $9 billion nuclear reactor project.

The publicly traded investor-owned utility doesn’t deserve confidentiality after wasting billions on “an expensive white elephant,” Office of Regulatory Staff attorney Wallace Lightsey told Circuit Judge John Hayes.

According to reporter John Monk of The State, Lightsey said, “I fail to see how documents relating to such a derelict project could have any legitimate claim to confidentiality.”

The records should fall under the state Freedom of Information Act, he said.

Emory Smith of the attorney general’s office urged Judge Hayes to issue no confidentiality orders as “we don’t believe any order can override the Freedom of Information Act.”

SCE&G attorney Jon Chally told the judge the ORS already has many of the SCE&G records and lacks the legal authority to decide about which documents to release to the public.

That should be left to the courts or the Public Service Commission, he said.

Chally said the FoIA allows trade secrets and other sensitive data to be kept secret.

Attorney Terry Richardson, who is suing for ratepayers, said SCE&G hides anything making it look bad.

Attorney Dan Haltiwanger played a tape-recorded phone call in which former SCE&G executive Carlette Walker said 5 top executives “have broken every friggin’ law in the book.”

Any criminal investigation would “eat those five bad guys alive,” she said.

Walker oversaw spending at the project and is a potential witness in an FBI investigation of the fiasco.

Richardson said SCE&G “whitewashed” a critical Bechtel Corp. audit of the project. “These are the people we are supposed to trust?” he said.