NuScale Power, a developer of small modular reactors, has received a new $10 million injection of cash.
That increases the amount of new investments in NuScale up to $453 million in the past few months.
The new money comes from an eight-year-old San Francisco-based investment firm SailingStone Partners. SailingStone is a subsidiary of Houston based Pickering energy Partners, which has investments of at least $15 billion.
Based in Corvallis, Ore., NuScale has the only small modular reactor (SMR) design approved so far by the U.S. Nuclear Regularity Commission.
“As a first mover in this space, NuScale is developing pioneering SMR technology that is crucial to achieving net zero (greenhouse gas) emissions targets,” said Ken Settles, managing director of SailingStone, in a press release.
NuScale plans to go public by June 30. Fluor Corp. plans to be the majority partner, with 60% ownership.
In late 2021, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC), Spring Valley Acquisition Corp, merged with NuScale. The acquisition company is a special entity set up in the Cayman Islands. A SPAC is a publicly-traded shell company that attracts investors as it hunts for a private company to acquire, which in this case is NuScale. A Spring Valley subsidiary Spring Valley Merger Sub, an Oregon limited liability corporation, is the entity that is actually merging with NuScale.
Spring Valley has provided $232 million in cash and $181 million in a private investment in public equity to the new public venture. Private investment in public equity is when an institutional or an accredited investor buys stock directly from a public company below market price. Some such investors for NuScale include Samsung C&T Corporation, DS Private Equity, Segra Capital Management and Pearl Energy.
NuScale has received a total of $221 million in private investment in public equity funding.
Founded in 2007, NuScale is developing a small modular reactor design, hoping to expand into manufacturing and selling the reactors.Small modular reactors are prefabricated facilities with parts manufactured in one location then transported to the reactor site for final assembly. A modular segment would consist of a mini-reactor of 77 megawatts. The design allows for extra modules to be added as needed.
In 2021, the Grant County Public Utility District in Washington signed an agreement to explore use of NuScale’s reactors in a project. The Grant County district is part of a joint venture with Energy Northwest of Richland, Wash., and X-energy of Greenbelt, Md., to build four 80-megawatt modular reactors at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in eastern Washington state by 2027.
Under the venture, Energy Northwest, which operates the 1,150-megawatt nuclear-power Columbia Generating Station, would provide a partially built reactor site abandoned in the early 1980s and assume operations of the facility. X-energy is also a reactor design firm.
Meanwhile, NuScale is also working with a major regional utility, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, to deploy a NuScale power plant in 2029.
NuScale has invested $1.3 billion into its development so far. It has 430 employees. The estimated value of the new merged public company is $1.9 billion.
