5 SMR Stocks and Funds That Investors Are Watching Right Now
From the only NRC-approved reactor designer to the pick-and-shovel play that's already profitable — here's who's showing up on nuclear watchlists in 2026.
Nothing in this article is financial advice. These are research notes, not recommendations. Do your own due diligence, understand the risks, and consider speaking with a qualified advisor before putting money into any of these names.
The nuclear energy trade has been one of the stranger rides in recent investment memory. Stocks exploded on AI power demand narratives in 2024, gave back enormous chunks of those gains through 2025 and early 2026, then started recovering as real milestones — NRC approvals, construction starts, billion-dollar contracts with tech giants — began landing. The sector is now in that uncomfortable middle zone where the narrative is strong but the revenues are still mostly hypothetical, the timelines are long, and the valuation spread between the most speculative plays and the actual cash-generating businesses is wide enough to swallow a submarine.
What follows is a look at five names that consistently appear on nuclear and SMR watchlists right now: two pure-play SMR developers, one diversified energy giant with skin in the game, one profitable supply chain company, and one fund for investors who’d rather spread the bet. They represent meaningfully different risk profiles, which is the point. Choosing one over another isn’t just a question of how bullish you are on nuclear — it’s a question of what kind of uncertainty you’re willing to sit with. 📈
1. NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR) — the first-mover with regulatory proof
NuScale Power occupies an unusual position: it’s a pre-revenue company trading on narrative, but the narrative has a concrete regulatory foundation that no US competitor can match. In May 2025, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved NuScale’s uprated 77-megawatt design — the second NRC certification the company has received, and the only SMR design in the United States with that status. That matters because any competitor building a US reactor has to go through the NRC review process, which takes years and costs tens of millions. NuScale already has the answer sheet. 🔬
The commercial picture is developing, slowly. Romania’s Nuclearelectrica shareholders approved the six-module RoPower project at the former Doicești coal plant, with a mid-2026 go/no-go final investment decision looming as a major near-term catalyst. In the US, NuScale’s strategic partner ENTRA1 has a nonbinding agreement with TVA for a potential 6 gigawatt deployment — the largest SMR program ever proposed in the country. NuScale ended Q1 2026 with $1 billion in liquidity, giving it meaningful runway even as revenue remains thin.
The risks are not subtle:
Revenue in 2025 was $31.5 million, down from $37 million in 2024 — the wrong direction
Bank of America restarted coverage at Neutral with a $12 price target, flagging that real reactor revenue likely waits until the early 2030s
The stock has been one of the most volatile names in the nuclear space, moving sharply on any news
Fluor, a major early backer, has been systematically selling its NuScale stake — a signal worth taking seriously
NuScale is a binary-style investment. Either the Romania project secures its final investment decision and the TVA program firms up into real contracts, or it remains a company that has never built a reactor and is burning cash faster than it earns it. Northland maintained an Outperform rating with a $19 target even after trimming from $21, citing dilution concerns. The gap between the bull and bear cases here is genuinely extraordinary, which is exactly why it stays on every watchlist. 💡
2. Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) — Sam Altman’s nuclear bet, now making real progress
Oklo is the company that most cleanly represents the nuclear startup trade: charismatic leadership, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as chairman, AI power deals with Meta and Switch already in place, and a fast reactor design that looks nothing like conventional light-water technology. It’s also, as of June 2026, making more concrete regulatory progress than its stock price suggests. ⚡
The NRC approved the Principal Design Criteria for Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse reactor in Q1 2026 — an accelerated milestone that directly strengthens the licensing timeline. The DOE selected Oklo for advanced negotiations under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program, which would give the company access to Cold War-era plutonium as reactor fuel. And subsidiary Atomic Alchemy received an NRC materials license in March 2026 to work with medical and industrial isotopes — Oklo’s first NRC approval of any kind and an early revenue pathway in a market worth over $7 billion globally.
The stock picture is complicated. Oklo raised $1.182 billion in a January 2026 equity offering, ending Q1 with $2.5 billion in cash. At a guided operational burn rate of $80 to $100 million per year, that’s theoretically decades of runway. But the stock trades at around $58 as of early June 2026 — down more than 70% from its 2025 highs — and Wolfe Research initiated coverage in May 2026 with a cautious Peer Perform rating and a fair value range of $51 to $71. Analyst consensus targets sit at roughly $89, implying significant upside from current levels if the milestones materialize.
Key catalysts to watch in the coming months:
Whether Atomic Alchemy achieves criticality at its Groves Isotopes Test Reactor in Texas by July 2026, per DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program
Progress on the Aurora reactor’s NRC licensing application
Securing HALEU fuel access, which remains the single biggest operational blocker for widespread commercial deployment
Firmness of the Meta and Switch power agreements as actual build timelines clarify
The thesis on Oklo is that it’s building not just a reactor but a full nuclear platform — isotopes, fuel recycling, reactor design — that could be worth far more than the current valuation if even half the pieces land. Whether that’s optimism or a story built on complexity to justify a price, I’m genuinely not sure. 🚀
3. GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) — the infrastructure giant with real earnings today
If the first two entries made you nervous, GE Vernova is the antidote. This is a company with a $150 billion backlog as of end-2025 and growing, actual revenue, actual earnings, and a SMR program that currently costs it money but which investors are treating as long-term optionality rather than the core business. 🌍
The SMR angle is the BWRX-300, developed jointly with Hitachi. The first commercial BWRX-300 is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada, the only commercial SMR under active construction in the Western world. Ontario Power applied for an operating license in March 2026; the first unit is targeted to come online by 2029. In the US, GE Vernova and Hitachi were selected for a new US-Japan nuclear program involving BWRX-300 deployments in Tennessee and Alabama as part of a wider $40 billion bilateral energy initiative. TVA’s construction permit application is with the NRC; a DOE grant of $400 million went to accelerate the Clinch River deployment.
The stock has been the standout performer in nuclear energy over the past year, up roughly 75% in 2026 year-to-date as of late April amid surging gas turbine demand, grid equipment orders, and nuclear momentum. The SMR business is currently a drag on margins — management said so explicitly — and they don’t expect that to flip before the late 2020s. So what investors are buying is:
The existing gas turbine and grid business, which is printing money
Nuclear as long-duration optionality embedded in a profitable enterprise
A company whose overall backlog grew $13 billion in just Q1 2026 alone
The valuation is not cheap at roughly 46 times forward earnings, pricing in a lot of the good news already. But unlike the pure-play SMR names, GEV isn’t a bet that ends at zero if the first reactor gets delayed. 💡
4. BWX Technologies (NYSE: BWXT) — the pick-and-shovel play with a moat
BWX Technologies is the name that sophisticated nuclear investors tend to mention when everyone else is arguing about Oklo and NuScale. That’s because BWXT is already profitable, generates real cash, and has a structural position in the nuclear supply chain that no competitor can easily replicate. As the only large commercial nuclear equipment manufacturing facility in North America, it’s one of the very few companies licensed to handle HALEU and TRISO fuel, manufacture naval reactor components, and produce specialized nuclear hardware at scale. ⚡
The numbers tell the story clearly:
Total 2025 revenue: $3.1 billion, generating net income of nearly $330 million
Backlog at end-2025: $7.3 billion — up 50% year over year
Commercial operations revenue (nuclear components, fuel handling, medical): up 63% to $853 million in 2025, continuing into Q1 2026 with 121% year-over-year growth
Analyst consensus on revenue and EBITDA CAGRs of 13% and 12%, respectively, through 2028
The SMR exposure is real but disciplined. BWXT signed a contract to manufacture the reactor pressure vessel for the BWRX-300 in January 2025. It signed a design contract for Rolls-Royce SMR steam generators in Q3 2025 and an agreement for future manufacturing. It provides engineering support to multiple SMR developers. This is the company that will likely make money whether NuScale, Oklo, GE Vernova, or some design not yet widely discussed wins the commercial reactor race — because someone has to manufacture the components, and BWXT is the only firm at scale to do it. 🔬
The stock is up nearly 100% over the past year. At roughly 31 times this year’s adjusted EBITDA, it’s not cheap by any standard measure. But a wide moat in a supply-constrained market with decades of contractual backlog tends to command a premium. The argument for owning BWXT is that it’s a nuclear play with a floor — the defense and government segment alone ($2.3 billion in 2025 revenue, $5.5 billion of the backlog) would keep the company healthy even if SMR deployment takes longer than expected.
Think of it as the boring answer that might actually turn out to be the right one. 📈
5. VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NLR) — spreading the bet across the whole chain
For investors who find the individual stock picking exercise genuinely daunting — and it is daunting — the VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NLR) offers a way to hold a diversified slice of the nuclear economy without committing to a single company’s execution risk. It tracks the MVIS Global Uranium & Nuclear Energy Index and spreads across uranium miners like Cameco, reactor operators and utilities like Constellation Energy, and reactor technology and services names including BWXT. 🌱
The performance has been striking. According to a May 2026 analysis, NLR gained 18% year-to-date and 98% over the prior 12 months as of late April 2026. That’s not a quiet corner of the market.
Why NLR rather than the purer Sprott Uranium Miners ETF (URNM), which was up 26% YTD and 119% over the same period? A few reasons worth thinking through:
URNM is heavily concentrated in uranium miners, with Cameco at a 20.2% weighting and significant exposure to Kazakh jurisdictional risk through Kazatomprom
NLR’s weighting toward utilities and reactor technology companies like Constellation Energy and BWXT gives it less sensitivity to uranium spot price swings
URNM pulled back 3% in a single session in April 2026 on no company-specific news — a reminder that pure miner exposure amplifies volatility in both directions
NLR pays an annual distribution (0.55% 30-day SEC yield in early 2026), which URNM does not
Neither is the obviously superior choice in all market conditions. URNM makes more sense if you have a strong view on uranium prices specifically. NLR makes more sense if you want exposure to the nuclear buildout without that commodity layer on top. Both carry more volatility than a broad equity index, and neither has a track record through a full SMR deployment cycle because that cycle hasn’t happened yet. ♻️
The broader nuclear ETF universe, including the Global X Uranium ETF (URA), gives investors additional options, but NLR remains the go-to for balanced nuclear sector exposure that includes the reactor builders and operators alongside the miners.
So here’s the question that matters: are you buying the technology, the fuel, the manufacturing infrastructure, or the idea that all of them win together? Each of these five positions bets on a different part of that answer — and having clarity on which part you believe in most is probably the most useful investment decision you can make in this space right now.