Should You Buy NuScale Power While It's Below $20?

NuScale Power is pursuing small modular reactors that could tap a claimed $10 trillion nuclear energy market, but it still has no firm customer sale and does not expect meaningful revenue for about two years. The company remains the only U.S. nuclear developer with an NRC-approved SMR design, yet the technology is unproven and the cancelled Idaho Carbon Free Power Project highlights execution and cost risk. Shares have already fallen more than 75% from all-time highs and trade below $13, leaving the stock highly speculative despite its large long-term opportunity.

Analysis

The market is treating SMR like a binary science project, but the more important setup is option value on grid bottlenecks rather than on near-term power sales. If AI buildout keeps pulling load closer to the data center edge, the first winners are not necessarily the reactor vendors — it’s the utility-equipment stack, EPC contractors, switchgear, cable, cooling, and gas peakers that monetize the interim need for firm power while SMR deployments slog through permitting and financing.

The underappreciated risk is that SMR economics are still being validated in public, which means every delay compounds the cost-of-capital problem. In infrastructure, a first-of-kind project tends to define the entire category’s valuation range; a weak first contract or a higher-than-expected delivered cost could compress the multiple far more than investors expect, especially if rates stay elevated and the market continues to punish long-duration, pre-revenue assets.

The contrarian view is that the current selloff may already reflect most of the execution risk, but not enough of the strategic scarcity premium. If a credible anchor customer appears over the next 6-18 months, the stock can re-rate sharply because the market will begin capitalizing a multi-year backlog rather than a prototype; if not, dilution and financing risk dominate and the equity likely behaves like a call option with negative theta. This creates a cleaner relative-value opportunity in the broader power-capex ecosystem than in SMR itself.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Avoid initiating a directional long in SMR here; use the next financing or project-announcement window as the real catalyst, since downside remains dominated by dilution and schedule slippage over the next 6-12 months.
• Long grid-enabling beneficiaries vs. short-duration SMR uncertainty: buy a basket of utilities/electrical infrastructure names exposed to data-center capex and grid hardening, while keeping SMR as a watchlist name only.
• Pair trade idea: long NEE/ETN (or similar power infrastructure beneficiaries) vs short SMR for 3-6 months; the long leg monetizes immediate grid spend while the short leg captures valuation reset risk if the first project slips.
• For aggressive accounts, consider a small call spread in SMR out 12-18 months only on confirmation of an anchor customer; target asymmetric upside, but size it as a venture-style ticket because the probability-weighted path is still unfavorable.
• If you want energy-transition exposure with better timing, prefer regulated utility or equipment names over pre-revenue nuclear developers until financing terms and first-of-kind capex are de-risked.