By Kennedy Maize — May 12, 2026
“Energy hyperbole and the madness of crowds are evident with both NuScale Power and Fermi America. Bubbles burst.”
The most mature U.S. small modular nuclear reactor vendo, NuScale Power, and a politically connected firm planning to build perhaps the largest reactor project in the U.S. to power an enormous Texas data center, Fermi America, have both suffered recent, major, possibly existential blows. NuScale and Fermi, both publicly traded, have seen their stock value plummet amid bad financial results, questionable management decisions, and attacks by the wolves of Wall Street, short sellers, and claims of securities fraud.
NuScale Power
Oregon-based NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) is the only advanced reactor vendor in this new market with a design approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a “first mover” advantage. It also uses the familiar and well-understood pressurized light water cooled technology, which has decades of mostly successful operation. NuScale has also had an important major shareholder, Texas-based energy engineering and construction giant Fluor Corp.
“Yet, when you look at its stock over the last six months, it doesn’t look like a company with a first-mover advantage,” comments The Motley Fool, an online investment analytics site.
Fluor is unloading its SMR shares, a strategy the company announced formally in February but has been understood to be well underway before that. In February, Fluor sold 71 million SMR shares, netting $2 billion. The company said it plans to unload the remaining 40 million shares this quarter.
Assessing NuScale’s business prospects, Seeking Alpha noted that the “stock appears overvalued relative to its fundamentals, with limited near-term revenue and a long timeline to meaningful commercialization.” The shares have been trading at about $12/share recently, not much higher than when it went public at the end of 2020. The high point for SMR was last July, when the shares were going for $50.
NuScale’s arrangement with the somewhat mysterious ENTRA1, the company’s “global strategic partner,” is also raising doubts about NuScale’s future. The contract with ENTRA1, says Seeking Alpha, required “a payment of ~$507.4 million” to the firm, a staggering amount considering that NuScale has never made anything like a profit.
Simply Wall Street commented, “In recent months, “NuScale Power has faced a series of securities-fraud class action filings alleging it misrepresented the experience and capabilities of commercialization partner ENTRA1 Energy, following weak fourth-quarter 2025 financial results and concerns about its path to market.”
One of the firms suing NuScale, California attorney Frank Cruz, in soliciting clients noted SMR’s astonishing net loss in the 2025 third quarter due to the ENTRA1 payment, “up from $46 million in the prior year period.” Cruz commented, “ENTRA1 had never built, financed, or operated any significant projects, let alone projects in the highly technical and complicated field of nuclear power generation, during its entire operating history” and “NuScale had entrusted its commercialization, distribution, and deployment of its NuScale Power Modules, and hundreds of millions of dollars of NuScale capital to an entity that lacked any significant prior experience owning, financing, or operating nuclear energy generation facilities.”
NuScale’s stock price has always been volatile, attracting short selling. That’s been the case recently. According to stock analysis Quiver Quantitative, “NuScale Power Corporation short interest was 38.92% of the float on April 15th, according to new data we received from Benzinga. Short interest totaled 66,321,822 shares, which was an increase of 23.88% from March 31st.”
Fermi America
Then there is Fermi America (NASDAQ: FRMI) with an incredibly optimistic business plan: the $60 billion “Project Matador,” using conventional electric generation, including natural gas and Westinghouse AP-1000 nuclear reactors, behind the meter, for a 17-GW mega data center in the Texas panhandle near the Department of Energy’s Pantex nuclear weapons plant. It would be named the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”
Among the founders of the company: Rick Perry, former Republican governor of Texas and U.S. energy secretary under Trump from March 2017 to December 2019. His role in the new company is largely image and political influence. The chief founder of the company was billionaire venture capitalist Toby Neugebauer, who has a sketchy business history according to Houston Chronicle business editorialist Chris Tomlinson.
Fermi LLC launched an initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange last September as Fermi America, offering 25 million shares at an expected $18–$22 per share. The sale was successful, making Perry a paper billionaire. In March at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference, the company said it would break ground on Project Matador this year.
But the company had serious problems behind the initial hype, which became obvious this year: no revenue, no commercial tenant for its non-existent data center, losses totaling close to $500 million, a plunging share price. In December, the national plaintiffs’ law firm Berger Montague PC of Philadelphia filed a class action lawsuit against Fermi after an unnamed firm, widely believed to be Amazon, dropped out of a deal to be the first data center tenant, reportedly worth $150 million.
Fermi’s stock began plunging soon after the bad news began emerging. This month, without a public announcement, CEO Neugebauer “resigned,” taking with him Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson. The share price hit $5.
Commenting to the Washington Post on the fall of the house of Fermi, Princeton University energy guru Jesse Jenkins said, “The idea that a few politically connected people with little experience could pull off a many billion dollar, many gigawatt, fully off the power grid project, is quite a gamble.”
Conclusion
Energy hyperbole and the madness of crowds are evident with both NuScale Power and Fermi America. Bubbles burst.
Kennedy Maize is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who has covered energy and environmental topics for more than 40 years. This post originally appeared at The Quad Report (May 1, 2026). His previous posts can be viewed here.
Buy on the rumor, and sell on the nooze.
— Some WS broker, routinely
Energy hyperbole and the madness of crowds are evident
Plenty more opportunities with fickles muddying the waters for years and there’s always the next big thing-
The race to unlock ‘superhot’ geothermal energy is heating up. Here’s why it matters
Perhaps I have watched too many SciFi movies, but these kinds of ideas seem rife with unintended consequences. One cannot totally dismiss the possibility of creating volcanos or fracturing the earth’s plates.
On the lighter side, I watched a movie the them of which was the earths mantel became unstable and volcanic and related geothermal activity was occurring at all of the fault lines. The solution (it worked in the movie) was to nuke LA. 🙂
Whatever the problem might be, I’m sure the solution is to nuke LA!
them = theme
Typos happen.
Not that I case, but someone seems opposed to consideration of unintended consequences. LOL
Was that intentional? case -> care
Yes. Stuff happens. But there’s a difference between occasional typos and consistent misspellings.
“…The solution (it worked in the movie) was to nuke LA…”
We should do it. From Orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Who safeguards the interests of gullible investors in the ‘energy’ industries?
Given the arrant nonsense / bullshit presented in stock market listing prospectuses (prospecti?) by “alternative green energy” players, it should almost be a RICO investigation necessity for every promoter.
Buyer beware.
Caveat emptor.
Wisdom for millennia.
90% of new US generating capacity added this year was solar. Nuclear? Zero.
That’s due to ideology, not necessity.
Yeah, but how much of that “US generating capacity” actually resulted in MWh of energy being fed into the grid on an annual basis . . . you know, accounting for nighttime darkness, sunlight being obscured by clouds and snow, peak demand limitations, energy pricing, maintenance downtimes, and solar farms being damaged by hailstorms and tornadoes?
ROTFL!
First, comparing generating capacity of wind or solar to ff plants is meaningless unless you include their respective capacity factors.
Secondly, Developers added approximately 6.3 GW of new natural gas-fired capacity so far in 2026. The U.S. has placed approximately 8.4 GW of utility-scale solar capacity into service this year. Taking the capacity factor into account, and new NG plants are contributing about 5GW to the grid. New solar is adding about 1.4 GW.
If you don’t grasp this, do some research.
NuScale is an interesting technology. It was in Building 10 when I was working in Building 9 on the HP campus in Corvallis. About a 5 minute walk. The photo is of the training/demo unit, which sits about 2 miles away from here, just off US 99 at Lewisburg, across from the Mountain View School where my son went to school.
It is a good technology. Price of the stock is low… may be a good time to buy.
You have some?
SMRs need assembly line volume production of cookie cutter identical systems to be cost competitive. The challenge is getting that factory built. Once it is in operation it will be very competitive because nuclear has the best capacity factor, the lowest mineral intensity, and the longest life of all energy sources, it cannot lose. But private enterprise cannot justify an SMR expenditure because the first of kind is way too expensive. The government needs to help by creating a market or providing financial support
.
$100’s of billions have been wasted on wind and solar, $10’s of billions for SMR will provide a power source that adds value to an economy instead of reducing value. The return on investment from unreliable, intermittent, low-capacity factor, short-life cycle W&S can never be economic because of diminishing returns. The more that it added to a grid the more expensive the power.
There is much to be said for NuScale’s technical approach to an SMR design. But do its clear technical and operational advantages really matter in today’s nuclear market ecosystem?
IMHO, the BWRX-300 is likely to be the first SMR to go into service on the North American continent, simply because it has a firm customer in Ontario Power Generation and it has a project team which has a record of success in nuclear fabrication and construction.
Why did OPG choose the BWRX-300 design? Mostly because a good number of its critical safety components can be manufactured in Ontario.
Terrapower Natrium? I do not believe for one minute that it can be brought into service in the timeframe which is now being advertised. Maybe by the mid to late 2030’s if everything goes well.
Nuclear energy is not competitive at the prices US firms build reactors. The Koreans build reactors at one-fifth the costs but they are not politically allowed to build in America. The nuclear establishment needs to be completely demolished since high nuclear costs are solely because of unnecessary regulations it has imposed.
“Nuclear energy is not competitive at the prices US firms build reactors. The Koreans build reactors at one-fifth the costs but they are not politically allowed to build in America. The nuclear establishment needs to be completely demolished since high nuclear costs are solely because of unnecessary regulations it has imposed.”
If we did away with the NRC’s regulations altogether, we might save ten percent on nuclear’s capital costs, maybe fifteen percent at the outside. But if we did away with the NRC altogether, we would also be closing down every nuclear power plant in America.
All complex industrial construction projects in the United States are three times more expensive than they were in the 1980’s. This is so for a variety of reasons, only some of which have to do with environmental and safety regulations.
For America’s problems with nuclear’s capital costs, it’s mainly the withered American industrial base in general, and the deeply withered nuclear construction industrial base in particular, which are the true drivers of these high capital costs.
In the last three decades, we sent much of our industrial base offshore and are now paying the price for that decision.
The only way this problem is resolved is to rebuild America’s larger industrial base in general, and to rebuild America’s nuclear industrial base in particular.
We buy nuclear for purposes of gaining energy reliability and security, for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs.
Nuclear energy is strictly a public policy decision. The bottom line here is that if we want a quick expansion of nuclear, the federal and state governments must themselves order enough reactors to reestablish a robust American nuclear industrial base, paying for these new reactors with taxpayer dollars.
The expression, “economy of scale” comes into play in your post.
“…For America’s problems with nuclear’s [sic] capital costs, it’s mainly the withered American industrial base in general, and the deeply withered nuclear construction industrial base in particular, which are the true drivers of these high capital costs…”
Add to that the myriad of lawsuits that every project faces – explicitly designed and timed to create expensive project delays in order to make the project uneconomic.
Nuclear is somewhat expensive relative to coal or gas even with a level playing field; but if you are a private company, or a public utility, knowing the lawfare that you are going to face and taking that into account kills the economics.
I disagree that the government needs to be the purchaser. There is nothing that the government can’t screw up an order of magnitude worse than it is.
Here in the year 2026, the threat of environmental lawsuits isn’t a major factor influencing the lack of orders for new reactors in the United States. Or even a factor at all, for that matter.
It’s been estimated that reducing a new-build reactor’s capital cost from $18,000/kw to $8,500/kw — which is the most capital cost reduction that knowledgeable insiders think is currently possible — requires at least ten firm orders for each reactor design, either for an AP1000 size reactor or for a BWRX-300 size reactor.
Private investors as a collective group will not take the financial risk of placing enough firm orders to reach that total of ten firm orders for a particular reactor design.
Only the federal and state governments have enough money to place a total of ten firm orders for a particular design. Which means that government, not the free market, will choose the winners in a revived American nuclear industrial base.
As for the fear of a series of failed government-funded nuclear projects, we know what it takes to build a nuclear power plant on time and on budget. You have to make realistic cost and schedule estimates upfront, and you have to do a thoroughly professional job in managing every facet of the project from beginning to end.
Why not allow Koreans to build at $3000/kw?
Mactoul: “Why not allow Koreans to build at $3000/kw?”
We couldn’t reach a figure as low as $3000/kw by doing that.
But in my opinion, we might reach ~$7000/kw by using Korea’s AP1400 reactor design, by manufacturing everything in Korea, and by using imported Korean project management talent and Korean nuclear-skilled craft labor to do the onsite work.
In other words, we would be importing a slice of the entire Korean nuclear industrial base in lieu of rebuilding America’s own nuclear industrial base to its former robust condition as it existed at the end of the 1980’s.
Would American politics allow that approach to be used? I think not. But that’s just my opinion.
Don’t forget years of delays caused by uncontrolled lawfare.
There is no point in supporting expensive nuclear. Get rid of the legion of unnecessary regulations, if necessary by gutting NRC. Savings isn’t going to be 10 percent but should be far more.
The NRC is not going away. Because if the NRC goes away, nuclear power in America goes away with it.
We will be seeing a reduction in the NRC’s regulations covering Linear No Threshold (LNT) and As Low as Reasonably Achievable (ALARA). But we will not be seeing a reduction in the NRC’s nuclear quality assurance requirements for safety-affecting systems and components.
The kind of management focus and project control discipline needed to achieve the NRC’s quality assurance requirements is the same management focus and project control discipline needed to successfully perform every other activity in pursuing any complex industrial construction project.
What was seen with the cost overruns and schedule delays in Vogtle 3 & 4 and with VC Summer in the 2010’s was the same thing seen in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, some nuclear projects were much better managed than others, with the result that those projects which had a strong management team and strong management systems weathered the changing environment of increasing nuclear regulation combined with the emergence of new technology plants which were much larger than older designs and which were being built without a prototype.
The basic reason why Vogtle 3 & 4 ran so far over budget and schedule is that Southern Nuclear made every mistake it is possible to make in managing a complex industrial construction project. They didn’t miss a one of the classic project management mistakes seen in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Just like in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Vogtle 3 & 4 didn’t get back on track to completion until the original project management team and the original project contractors were completely replaced by people who knew what they were doing.
It may be worth considering whether the people connected with the two companies took the opportunity of going public at a time when nuclear publicity was high, so that they could raise a lot of money, with the intention of transferring a substantial proportion of the raised funds into their own bank accounts. After that, it doesn’t matter much to them whether the companies actually make any product or make any money. Such companies are known as Lifestyle companies, but these seem to be quite large ones. NB. That’s a thought not an accusation, the court cases reportedly in progress will hopefully resolve the matter.
So, nothing to do with the technology, just bad financial decisions.
The technology is sound; however, it is disadvantaged by incompetent government regulation. The Chinese wouldn’t hesitate to build these plants, and eventually they probably will once they’ve stolen the technology. Look at what happened to Westinghouse’s AP-1000.
In the US, oil/gas interests also work to undermine any significant progress in a baseload technology that could cut into their profits from electricity production. This is why they like “renewables” — they’re not a significant threat. Nuclear fission on the other hand has a proven record of 20% electricity generation going back almost half a century. In France, the record is over 70%, again over many decades.
See my comment above. We buy nuclear for purposes of gaining energy reliability and security, for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs. Nuclear energy is strictly a public policy decision. The bottom line here is that if we want a quick expansion of nuclear, the federal and state governments must themselves order enough reactors to reestablish a robust American nuclear industrial base, paying for these new reactors with taxpayer dollars.
Gas is utterly reliable. Why pay any premium over it?
“Gas is utterly reliable. Why pay any premium over it?”
An energy future based on expanding gas-fired generation isn’t a completely reliable solution to our growing demand for electricity.
Expanding our dependence on gas-fired generation requires expanding our pipeline capacity and/or shipping more LNG to gas-fired power plants by rail. These factors make gas-fired generation more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions than is nuclear.
But the basic question still remains. If we choose to add nuclear capacity for its energy security and reliability benefits, how much of a premium over gas-fired generation should we be willing to pay?
That is strictly a public policy decision. Which is one more reason why a quick expansion of nuclear here in the US will only happen if it is being financed by taxpayer dollars.
I remain unconvinced the oil/gas interests work to undermine any significant progress.
You can bet if nuclear were profitable without a 5-10 year investment the oil companies were be in the game.
A shame. The fail is business management and has nothing to do with the technology or technical challenges.
We now get to view the flooding of how great WTGs and SV are. Joy.
A successful nuclear construction project requires three things — a sound reactor design, a competent nuclear project team, and access to lots of money. The NuScale SMR has a sound reactor design and it has a competent nuclear construction project team led by Fluor. But it does not have access to lots of money.
The basic reasons why the BWRX-300 design will likely be the first SMR to go live on the North American continent are that the reactor design is technically sound, Ontario Power Generation has assembled a competent project team, and OPG has access to lots of money.
Someone has to pay the upfront costs of establishing an SMR industrial base. The NuScale/Fluor estimate for the cancelled Utah/Idaho project came in at $18,000/kw nominal capital cost. OPG’s estimate for its Darlington SMR project is likewise $18,000/kw nominal capital cost. Both figures reflect the upfront costs associated with building a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactor design.
The difference here is that while the cancelled NuScale/Fluor project couldn’t get enough utility funding to build that very first NuScale SMR plant, the Darlington SMR project is going forward because money is available to pay for it.
Let Canadians squander their money.
The Canadians intend to make themselves the goto people for nuclear technology and nuclear project management expertise on the North American continent.
If a quick expansion of nuclear power does actually happen here in America through greatly expanded government financing of nuclear projects, the Canadians will be in a strong position to capitalize on that expansion.
We know there is a market for electricity, we know how to build current nuclear power generators. Get busy building them and when the newer technology proves itself get busy building them. This is not complicated.