$10,000 in NuScale at Its 52-Week High Is Worth About $1,650 Today

A $10,000 investment in NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR) made at the stock's 52-week high of $57.42 last October is worth about $1,650 as of this writing, with shares near $9.50. That's a loss of about five-sixths of the money in about 10 months.

The slide hasn't been a straight line, though. Shares started 2026 above $16, rallied above $20, and have since fallen by more than half.

The small modular reactor (SMR) developer still holds the only SMR design certified by U.S. regulators. What changed is nearly everything around it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Between the two prices

Revenue effectively stopped. The second quarter brought in $75,000. A year earlier, the same quarter produced $8.1 million, most of it engineering fees from the company's Romanian project. That work finished in late 2025, and nothing has been signed to replace it.

The share count kept climbing. A year ago, NuScale's results were spread across a weighted average of about 133 million Class A shares. This past quarter, that figure was about 365 million.

And on Aug. 11, the company filed to sell up to $750 million more stock over time. Selling shares is how NuScale funds itself, and its $1.9 billion in cash and investments was raised largely that way. That cash removes any near-term funding worry.

Meanwhile, the orders that would justify October's price stayed pending. The Tennessee Valley Authority remains in discussions with NuScale's commercialization partner toward a power purchase agreement the company says could become the largest nuclear deployment program in U.S. history. Those talks aren't a contract. Romania's six-module RoPower project is still working through conditions attached to a shareholder vote.

To be fair, NuScale has met milestones along the way: an updated design approval from regulators in May 2025, and a supply chain of more than 60 partners, by the company's count. The design and the balance sheet have held up.

However, even after an 83% drop, the company's market value sits near $4.1 billion -- against about $10.7 million of trailing revenue. The valuation no longer assumes everything goes right, the way it arguably did at $57. It still assumes the orders eventually come. Until a contract actually arrives, that assumption is the whole investment case.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends NuScale Power. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.