Nuclear Stocks Slide as Piper Sandler Splits the Sector: Oklo, NuScale Power and X-Energy All Drop 5%

Shares of Oklo (NYSE:OKLO | OKLO Price Prediction), NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) and X-Energy (NASDAQ:XE) are sliding together in Thursday afternoon trading after Piper Sandler issued a split rating action across advanced nuclear. Oklo stock is down 5% to $40.50, with the year-to-date (YTD) decline now at 44%.

Meanwhile, NuScale Power stock is falling 5% to $10.32 at midday. At the same time, X-Energy stock is off 5% to $16.42, extending a rough stretch for the newly public reactor developer.

The selling is concentrated inside the nuclear/uranium sector itself. The Global X Uranium ETF (NYSEARCA:URA) is down 3%. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is off by 0.5%, indicating that the pressure is contained to the nuclear group rather than market-wide.

Piper Sandler Splits the Sector

Piper Sandler analyst Dimple Gosai initiated coverage across advanced nuclear stock this morning with opposing calls on two developers. She started Oklo at a Buy rating with a $55 price target, describing the company’s business model as bankable by design and arguing that the structure makes projects easier to finance and customers easier to secure, according to Piper Sandler.

Gosai also started X-Energy at a Sell rating with a $9 price target, on the view that its more asset-light approach leaves customers carrying more of the technology and project risk. Her note cited bipartisan federal policy support and demand from large cloud operators for reliable, carbon-free power as tailwinds for the industry overall.

Business Model as the Deciding Factor

Oklo intends to finance, build, own and operate its plants and then sell the electricity. That approach lets a buyer obtain nuclear power without becoming a developer or taking on responsibility for deploying unfamiliar reactor technology. The company is developing a fast reactor cooled by liquid sodium in place of water, a design that avoids the high-pressure steam systems used in conventional reactors.

Oklo is targeting first commercial power at its Aurora powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory in late 2027 to early 2028, with a customer pipeline of roughly 14 GW anchored by a 12 GW Switch agreement. NuScale Power holds the only U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) design certification in the small modular reactor (SMR) industry, and it ended Q2 2026 with $1.9 billion in cash and investments as ENTRA1 Energy advances a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) program for up to 6 GW. X-Energy came public in April 2026, raising roughly $1.1 billion in net proceeds, and counts Dow, Amazon and Centrica among its anchor customers.

Why the Group Is Falling Together

All three nuclear stocks mentioned here are declining by roughly the same amount, a pattern that reads as a sector move across the group. The oddity is that the slide arrives on the same morning one of the three received a fresh Buy initiation, so the sector is trading on the bearish half of the note and setting the bullish half aside.

Advanced SMR names have been one of the hottest 2026 trades, tied to AI data center power demand, Department of Energy support, and various hyperscaler nuclear deals. The Department of Energy projects data centers will account for up to 12% of U.S. electrical demand by 2028, a backdrop that has powered the whole group higher for much of the year.

Oklo’s YTD figure is the context that matters most for anyone weighing a longer horizon, and the broader nuclear restart trade has more moving parts than any single name, which we mapped across five stocks in a free report here. A name down that far across the year sits at a very different price than when AI power demand was the consensus trade. What the research actually argues is that the business model, more than the reactor technology itself, decides who can finance a first plant, and that is the distinction a longer view of this sector may need to rest on.

What to Watch Next

The Piper Sandler note reframes the sector debate around financing structure, and Thursday’s reaction suggests the group is being marked down together before winners and losers get separated. Longer-term shareholders can watch for whether Oklo’s licensing and site-construction milestones at Idaho National Laboratory begin to validate the bankable-by-design thesis. Investors may want to size their nuclear exposure for volatility, given how quickly sentiment across the group can turn on a single research call.

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