New York, June 5, 2026, 17:30 (EDT)
- NuScale Power traded at $10.50, down $1.51, or about 12.6%, after swinging between $10.16 and $12.76 on Friday.
- The move came as Wall Street sold off sharply, with the Nasdaq down 4.18% and the S&P 500 off 2.64%.
- Other advanced-nuclear names also fell, including Oklo, Nano Nuclear Energy and X-Energy.
NuScale Power Corp shares slid about 12.6% in late New York trading on Friday, caught in a broad selloff that hit technology-linked and speculative power stocks hard. The stock last traded at $10.50, with volume near 49.5 million shares.
The move matters because NuScale has become one of the market’s cleaner ways to trade the small modular reactor theme. Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are factory-built nuclear reactors designed in smaller units than conventional plants, a model backers say can cut construction risk and help serve power-hungry data centers.
Friday’s tape was ugly well beyond NuScale. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 4.18% and the S&P 500 fell 2.64% after a stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report raised concern that the Federal Reserve could stay hawkish for longer. “The dam just broke today,” Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group, told Reuters. Reuters
That pressure spilled across the nuclear growth trade. Oklo fell 11.1%, Nano Nuclear Energy dropped about 10.0%, and X-Energy lost 9.5%, based on late prices. X-Energy, another nuclear developer, was also in focus after reporting a widened quarterly loss in its first earnings report as a public company, Investor’s Business Daily reported.
The stock had already faced a colder analyst read this week. Citi was reported as most constructive on Centrus Energy among nuclear names but least constructive on NuScale, pointing to better exposure in the upstream nuclear supply chain and more caution on NuScale’s near-term prospects.
NuScale’s central bull case is still regulatory position. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved its 77-megawatt reactor design in May 2025, after an earlier 50-megawatt design approval, and NuScale Chief Executive John Hopkins said at the time the company had “near-term deployable” U.S. technology. Reuters
But the market is pressing the other side of the story: timing, customers and cash burn. NuScale ended the first quarter with $1.0 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments — liquidity, meaning resources available to fund the business — while revenue fell because earlier RoPower license and engineering work had wrapped up.
Hopkins said last month that demand for reliable, carbon-free power had “never been greater,” and that NuScale had an NRC-approved design, an established supply chain and components in production. He added: “We are building the infrastructure” for the moment. NuScale Power
The latest company update this week was about governance rather than a new customer order. NuScale said Stuart Harshaw and Dale Klein joined its board after the May 29 annual meeting, bringing the board to nine directors, eight of them independent.
The risk is that the nuclear theme keeps running ahead of signed orders and project economics. NuScale’s first U.S. project with a Utah municipal power group was canceled in 2023 as costs rose and some towns withdrew, while critics of SMRs argue they may be costly to operate and still leave unresolved waste issues.
For now, NuScale is trading less like a utility supplier and more like a high-duration growth stock: sensitive to rates, risk appetite and every fresh read on nuclear deployment. Ohsung Kwon, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo, told Reuters the broader selloff looked “more driven by positioning rather than fundamentals,” but that distinction may offer little comfort to holders after Friday’s drop. (Reuters
