By Kennedy Maize
September has been the cruelest month when it comes to the highly hyped, long anticipated U.S. “nuclear renaissance.”
On July 8, New Jersey based Holtec Nuclear Corp. dropped a 400-page document on the doorstep of Washington’s Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking approval to sell common stock to the public. The planned “Initial Public Offering” (IPO) of 50 million shares was widely expected to yield a billion dollars or so in new investments.
On September 8, Holtec launched what it described as a “roadshow” to highlight the IPO. Holtec aspires to become the Swiss Army Knife of U.S. nuclear power. It deconstructs old, shuttered nuclear plants. It reconstructs promising old, shuttered nuclear plants. It wants to construct new, small modular nuclear plants, at 300-MW per pop.
In late August, Holtec got a green light from the U.S. Nuclear Regulation Commission to start loading fuel into the elderly 805-MW Palisades nuclear plant on Lake Michigan, which Holtec acquired from Entergy in June 2022 as a decommissioning project. Holtec immediately said it would seek to restart the plant. It’s taken longer and cost more than Holtec planned for the restart, but loading fuel signaled that the plant could soon again generate power.
On September 17, Holtec pulled the plug on the planned IPO. In a news release, the company said that “we have decided to postpone our initial public offering at this time. The Company intends to maintain its registration statement on file with the SEC.
“The decision to postpone the offering has been caused by the unusual confluence of developments that has impaired investor confidence in the market for new public offerings. The adverse market sentiment has affected the equity markets in general and the nuclear sector in particular in the past two weeks. We attribute the ongoing retreat of the nuclear energy sector to a perfect storm of adverse developments, driven primarily by uncertainty over data center development, which has compounded a set of pre-existing headwinds, including rising energy costs, elevated global trade tensions, ongoing military conflicts, and mounting inflation fears that have driven the central banks of major economies (EU, Japan and US) to raise their benchmark rates.”
Out West, Terra Power’s unique and controversial 345-MW Natrium fast neutron reactor, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy, and under early construction (without an NRC-approved reactor design) in remote Kemmerer, Wyo., suffered a serious blow September 13, when the prime engineering and contractor Bechtel Power Corporation walked away from the next phase of the project. Bechtel has been the lead contractor on the project since 2020 and started field construction work in Wyoming in April.
The notice of the split came in a state-required Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act letter. Bechtel’s home is in Reston, Va., a Washington suburb.
In the letter, Bechtel’s Suchit Chopra, Natrium project director, wrote, “Terrapower and Bechtel were unable to reach an agreement on the next phase of the project and have decided to move forward separately. Bechtel will therefore scale down its operations supporting the project and reduce staffing levels as work is completed, including at the following location: 11955 Democracy Drive, Reston VA 20190.
“It is currently anticipated that there will be approximately 200 affected positions and employees at the Reston location. The reductions are expected to commence on or about November 16, 2026.” The letter does not specify the magnitude of the layoffs in Wyoming.
Shortly after the NRC agreed to allow construction work to start, the Denver-based construction law firm McConaughy & Sarkissian commented, “TerraPower hired Bechtel to serve under an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contract where Bechtel holds a single contract with TerraPower covering design, procurement, and construction.”
The law firm added, “The Kemmerer Plant faces significant construction risks. The plant will feature a Natrium reactor, which uses liquid sodium rather than water as a coolant, combined with a molten salt energy storage system. This will be the first plant using this technology at a commercial scale in the United States. History has shown that nuclear construction projects, particularly first-of-a-kind designs like this one, are uniquely susceptible to construction defects, delays, and cost overruns. The consequences of such issues can lead to regulatory shutdowns, legal disputes, and severe safety hazards.”
Moving on to the small modular reactor world, NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) has seen its stock continuing to fluctuate at far below its earlier values, a common phenomenon among the buzzing swarm of small reactor wannabes. Over the past year, the shares have traded across an enormous range, from high of $57.42 to $8.27 per share as of September 18. NuScale is the most mature of the small nukes crowd, the only company with a reactor design approved by the NRC (before the advent of the Trump NRC). On September 15, barchart analyst Ruchi Gupta commented, “That volatility stems from a mix of factors: heavy retail investor interest, elevated short interest fueling sharp swings in both directions, and macroeconomic shifts in interest rates that disproportionately affect capital-intensive, pre-revenue growth companies.”
Also weighing on NuScale is its strange relationship with its marketing and operation partner ENTRA1. ENTRA1 on behalf of NuScale reached a hypothetical deal with the giant, federal Tennessee Valley Authority to deploy up to 6-GW of capacity at each of up to seven sites.
In a news release, NuScale said, “Under the agreement, the program aims to deploy six ENTRA1 Energy Plants™, each powered by multiple NuScale Power Modules™, to provide up to 6 GW of firm, 24/7 baseload power within TVA’s service region. ENTRA1 Energy Plants™ are owned and financed through ENTRA1.” TVA has not signed a power purchase agreement, but NuScale is obligated to make payments to ENTRA1.
Examining the deal, TechStock2 market intelligence commented in August that a power purchase agreement between NuScale and ENTRA1 may expose NuScale to “a significant liability to ENTRA1. The binding power purchase agreement, covering 72 modules, suggests an obligation of approximately $1.184 billion. This early projection represents 62.5% of available liquidity as of June.”
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