Nuclear Power’s Biggest IPO in Years Is on the Way

Holtec is restoring a reactor at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan. (Courtesy Holtec International)

Holtec International, a key player in the nuclear industry, plans to go public within several months, CEO Krishna Singh told Barron’s on Monday.

The IPO would almost certainly be the largest nuclear-energy offering in years, giving investors one of the few pure-play ways of buying into the industry. Unlike some other nuclear names, Holtec already produces substantial revenue from activities like decommissioning nuclear plants and handling nuclear waste. The company could be worth more than $10 billion.

Holtec is also on the verge of doing something never before attempted in America—bringing back a decommissioned nuclear plant. The company is restoring a reactor at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which had been shut down in 2022 for financial reasons. It has received hundreds of millions of dollars of support from the state of Michigan and the Department of Energy for the project.

In addition, Holtec plans to place another two small modular reactors, or SMRs, at the Michigan site, although it has not yet received federal or state approval to do so. Holtec is already building the equipment for those reactors in conjunction with Hyundai Engineering & Construction.

Singh founded Holtec, which is based in Camden, NJ,  in 1986. For years, the company has made money by decommissioning existing nuclear plants, which involves carefully disassembling the plants and storing their used nuclear fuel. The company also builds containment units for spent fuel that are sold around the world. Its annual profits are upward of $500 million, according to a source familiar with the company’s results. Singh said he’s hoping to sell about 20% of the company’s equity to investors.

“It will be probably January, although my consultants said it will be April,” he said. “They’re conservative.”

Singh said he is discussing with the consultants if the company’s books are “up to snuff to be a public company.” A company spokesman said afterward that Singh was referring to the company’s software and reporting technology, not its financial controls.

Singh said the company will use proceeds from the equity sale to help it expand construction of small modular reactors. “The real driver for us is we are on our own calendar,” he said. “We’re going to be building, we think, in the next decade 10-20 small modular reactors at the same time.”

Assuming the company perfects the process of building them, each of those reactors could cost about $3 billion to construct. “The capital needed for that is enormous,” he said. Singh said he is open to Holtec operating the units themselves, or selling them to third parties.

Like other nuclear companies, Holtec has been talking to data center operators about buying nuclear power, he said.

Many of these ideas will take years to play out. The company has not yet licensed its design, and there are no SMRs currently operating in the United States.

Holtec’s market value would likely exceed the value of other nuclear developers, which still have relatively minimal amounts of revenue, if any at all. “It’s a more mature company with more revenue than others that have gone public,” said Seth Grae, CEO of nuclear fuel company Lightbridge.

Oklo, another reactor developer, is worth $8 billion, and microreactor company Nano Nuclear is worth $1.5 billion. Nuscale, the most valuable small-scale nuclear developer and the only one with a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is worth a little over $10 billion.

Shares of Oklo and Nuscale have soared more than 200% in the past year, as tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon have expressed interest in buying power from nuclear reactors for their AI data centers. Asked if Holtec ought to be worth more than those existing nuclear developers, Singh said, “In a fair market, I think we should be worth a whole lot more. We actually make things.”

Grae agreed that Holtec will probably be worth over $10 billion, and said that the company should see considerable appetite from investors. “They’re doing it at exactly the right moment,” he said. “There’s so much investor interest in nuclear.”

The timing will be even better if Holtec can successfully reopen Palisades. Singh said the project is likely to be operating in November, a few weeks after the company’s best-case-scenario date of October. A Holtec spokesman said the pushback on the date is because Holtec chose to do additional work on the project, and it keeps the company within its goal of completing the project in the fourth quarter.

Corrections & Amplifications
Holtec International has annual profits of more than $500 million, according to a person familiar with the company’s results. An earlier version of this article said that figure was the company’s revenue.

Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com