From Idaho to Trump: Politics Behind NuScale’s $12B Surge

The Obscure Energy Group With White House Ties Driving NuScale — And Why Investors Should Think Twice

$12 Billion for a Company With No Reactor

NuScale Power has become one of the poster children for the market’s bet on nuclear energy. With a $12 billion market cap and just $40 million in annual revenue, the company has yet to build a single operational plant. The stock grew from $2 in the Jan’24 to $38 as of today, dwarfing the likes of Palantir and Nebius. One of the reasons of such a huge growth is political connections and strange coincidences when the projects were green lighted after solid contributions to Trump’s campaign.

Nuscale sits in the same “nuclear revolution” basket as names like Nano Nuclear (NNE), Oklo (OKLO), and Constellation Energy (CEG) — firms that investors tie to the AI data center boom and the coming energy crunch, even if their businesses are wildly different.

The question is simple: can a company with no clients, no operating assets, and only one “maybe” project in Romania really be worth $12 billion?

What’s an SMR?
SMR stands for Small Modular Reactor — a nuclear reactor designed to be smaller, built in a factory, and shipped to the site for assembly. The idea is to cut construction time, reduce costs, and make nuclear projects scalable in a way traditional gigawatt-scale plants aren’t. In theory, SMRs could power anything from industrial plants to data centers — but no one has yet deployed them commercially at scale.

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From Idaho to Romania

The collapse of NuScale’s U.S. project in Idaho left the company with no operating plants and no paying customers. Today, its only serious commercial prospect is a small modular reactor plant in Romania — a project that has not yet received the government’s final approval to build.

The site is being prepared by Fluor Corporation, an industrial giant and one of NuScale’s largest shareholders. On paper, this gives the project credibility. In practice, NuScale’s role so far has been limited to engineering and early-stage design work.

Financially, Romania has been a modest lifeline: in the past year, the company booked roughly $55 million in revenue from preliminary services there — against $200 million in spending, funded largely by issuing new shares.

Source: Nuscale

Original sin

To understand the prospects of the Romanian project, we need to go back to the U.S. one — launched only thanks to multibillion-dollar subsidies from the Department of Energy. NuScale’s Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) in Idaho was meant to be the world’s first commercial SMR, built for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) to supply carbon-free baseload electricity to cities across the western U.S.