Even Elon Musk Now Admits Natural Gas Isn't Going Away. Here's What That Means for Nuclear Energy Stocks, Including NuScale Power and Oklo

SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX will aggressively use natural-gas power to meet rising rocket-launch demand and its AI compute load, viewing gas as a bridge until solar is stronger. Bank of America also frames nuclear as a long-run $10T opportunity, but the article warns the natural-gas pivot could delay near-term cash flows for unprofitable SMR developers like NuScale and Oklo, increasing dilution and long-term viability risk.

Analysis

The market is likely to over-interpret this as a broad anti-nuclear signal, but the real mechanism is financing and timing: if the easiest near-term solution for incremental load is gas, then the terminal value of pre-cash-flow SMR stories gets pushed further out. For OKLO and SMR, that matters more than the headline narrative because both trade on a future adoption curve that is already vulnerable to dilution and execution slippage; each additional year of “bridge” power reduces the present value of first meaningful free cash flow.

Second-order winners are the adjacent gas value chain, not just upstream producers but also midstream, compression, and power infrastructure providers that can monetize faster than nuclear projects can be permitted. The risk is that this remains a company-specific infrastructure choice rather than a sector-wide capex shift; if so, the selloff in SMR equities should be tactical, not structural. The more important test over the next 1-3 months is whether other AI/data-center operators echo the same preference, because one additional large customer could meaningfully re-rate the adoption timeline.

Contrarian view: consensus may be missing that gas as a bridge can actually preserve the long-run nuclear option by preventing near-term reliability failures and buying time for larger plants to scale. That means the bearish case for SMR is strongest in the next 6-18 months, not forever. The thesis breaks if either policy support accelerates (federal/state-backed SMR offtake, loan guarantees, or utility approvals) or if gas prices tighten enough to make the bridge materially less attractive versus firm low-carbon baseload.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Short OKLO/SMR on strength for a 1-3 month mean-reversion trade; these are the most duration-sensitive names and remain vulnerable to any sign that AI customers prefer cheaper bridge power over first-of-a-kind nuclear projects.
• If you want a relative-value expression, pair long NGS (or broader nat-gas infrastructure exposure) vs short SMR; the trade benefits from a delay in nuclear adoption while preserving exposure to the infrastructure needed to serve incremental load.
• Do not chase a large short here unless there is follow-through from another hyperscaler or a data-center developer; one company’s power procurement choice is not yet enough to impair the entire SMR complex.
• Set a reversal alert: cover SMR shorts if there is a credible utility-backed SMR financing package, DOE loan guarantee, or first commercial contract announcement with an investment-grade counterparty; that would re-open the growth multiple.
• Watch Henry Hub and power-price spreads over the next quarter: if gas prices spike enough to erode the bridge advantage, the market may rotate back into nuclear duration and the SMR short thesis weakens materially.