NuScale Power Corp, a Corvallis, Ore., developer of small modular reactors, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday.
The company on April 28 formally completed a merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, to form NuScale Power Corp., the company announced Monday.
The acquisition company is a special entity set up in the Cayman Islands. Such special purpose acquisition companies are publicly-traded shell companies that attracts investors as it hunts for a private company to acquire, which in this case was NuScale. A Spring Valley subsidiary, Spring Valley Merger Sub, an Oregon limited liability corporation, is the entity that merged with NuScale.
The publicly traded NuScale has an expected value of more than $2.2 billion. NuScale has the only small modular reactor design approved so far by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“Our mission at NuScale has always been simple: to develop a safer, smarter and more cost-effective form of advanced nuclear power capable of meeting a wide spectrum of future electric and thermal energy needs – from replacing coal-fired plants with carbon-free, dispatchable baseload electricity to powering commercial scale water desalination and clean hydrogen production. Today marks a historic moment for NuScale as we become the first publicly traded company focused on the design and deployment of SMR technology,” said NuScale President John Hopkins in a press release.
Fluor Corp., which was already in a partnership with NuScale, expects to be the majority partner of the public venture, with 60% ownership.
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.
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.
