Repainting the canvas. The nuclear energy opportunity has been gathering renewed interest lately. Up until The Southern Company’s plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 finally got completed and brought online in 2023 and 2024, it had been nearly four decades since new traditional nuclear capacity had been built from scratch. Decommissioning and retirement of nuclear power plants began in the 1980’s, slowed in 2000-2010, and then reached its peak from 2012- 2022, taking capacity out of the system. Fears from accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the question of the impact of nuclear waste, as well as accelerating capital costs, increasing regulatory hurdles, and cheaper fossil fuel energy sources, made it look like nuclear energy generation was on a glide path to less, not more. More recently, as climate change gained increasing visibility and acceptance, the transition to renewable (and “green” sources) from non-renewable sources seemed like it was on a glide path upward and more. Nuclear fit in an odd spot of at first being considered dirty and not “green” (radioactive waste), to being considered “zero emissions” and therefore “green.” This significant perception change seems to have been driven in part by a number of factors, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reality of increased costs, the inconvenience and practical problems of intermittent availability of wind and solar, and the reality of the lengthening of the time it was taking to transition to renewables and the economic cost to the people who actually depend on and consume electricity in their daily lives. Then with the advent of AI and the need for data centers and other increases in demand for electricity, the need for power now, on as cost-effective a basis as possible, has seemingly gained the upper hand.

The underlying parchment. Traditional nuclear power that is already in place is still the only source of nuclear power for the next few years and the only meaningful source until the 2030’s. As of early 2026, the U.S. has 94 operating reactors across 54 nuclear power plants, with total net generating capacity of about 97.0 GW. In 2024, U.S. nuclear reactors generated about 816 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, roughly 18–19% of U.S. electricity generation, and about 55% of carbon-free electricity. Commercial nuclear plants today use controlled nuclear fission: splitting heavy atoms (usually uranium) in a reactor core, releasing heat. That heat is transferred to water (or another coolant), producing steam that spins a turbine-generator set—similar to fossil plants, but without combustion emissions. The current U.S. commercial fleet is composed entirely of light‑water reactors (LWRs) using one of two dominant LWR designs: Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) and Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs).

Building the new on top of the old. Sources for new nuclear generation mostly still come from the baseline old fleet: from extending legal commissioning and useful lives for existing operating plants, recommissioning and restarting of previously retired and decommissioned plants, and improvement of existing generating assets through technology and efficiency projects called up-rating. Another potential new source is smaller nuclear plants (called small modular reactors or SMRs) and advanced non-light-water reactors, which are hoped to be less capital intensive and lower cost, easier to permit and site, more flexible to manufacture such as in factories rather than on-site, and scalable. There are a number of new private and public companies that are pursuing these opportunities, but it is still years away and almost none are currently generating energy or are connected to the grid, much less operating a scale.

The dream. The third potential source of new nuclear power is based on a completely different physics process altogether: fusion versus fission. Although the potential of limitless energy captured by harnessing the power of the sun in a controlled manner, here on planet earth, is enticing, the problems and complexities appear to keep it further out than even quantum computing, which is still potentially five or 10 years away from widespread application, according to many sources. However, both of these still capture the imagination, particularly set against what we are experiencing with the fruition of AI, which also had always been decades away until the last several years, depending on how you define it. But the reality-check truth regarding commercially viable competitive power from fusion is that most guesses extend beyond 2040 and perhaps not until 2100.

Gaining exposure to the new layer. All that being said, nuclear energy and its associated ecosystem is proving to be investable and increasing in scale. This has been illustrated recently by the allocation of real investment dollars in announced private and public deals. Nuclear exposure can be gained through a number of avenues, some more direct and concentrated than others: Traditional electric and gas utilities that own nuclear assets (i.e..—Constellation Energy, the largest, and the owner of the Three Mile Island restart which they renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center), independent power producers (i.e.—Vistra Corp), fledgling public companies with very little, if any, in the way of revenues and earnings, focused on new technologies (i.e. NuScale Power Corporation and OKLO Inc.), the industrial “pick-and-shovels” suppliers to the providers (i.e.–GE Vernova, Inc. and BWX Technologies). These are just illustrative examples and are not intended to be investment recommendations in this context. While it is possible to obtain direct exposure to the fuel source, uranium, it is not practical for most investors. The material itself is mined and processed and not scarce enough to prevent oversupply. It is a very small market. An estimate of a years’ worth of current demand at current prices is ~$11 billion dollars, according to a Bernstein estimate, smaller than the market capitalization of Hormel Foods, maker of the famous Spam. Exposure can practically only be gained through a couple of non-US public mining companies. “Exposure” in the S&P 500 amounts to less than one percent of revenues for the direct producers of nuclear power and their infrastructure providers, but rises to 20% for companies with a “critical dependency” such as big tech and utilities, although this is a pretty loosey-goosey estimate, in our view. Globalt does have exposure of this sort in both our ETF-based strategies and in our large cap equity strategies, and we continue to closely evaluate investments in this area for our clients.

Authored by Tomas Martin

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