NuScale Brand Guidelines: An Oregon State Spin-Out & the First NRC-Approved SMR Design

A university test loop that became a reactor company.

NuScale grew out of a university laboratory. English Wikipedia says the work began with research at Oregon State University in Corvallis, funded by the US Department of Energy from 2000, and that an OSU team led by José N. Reyes Jr. built a one-third-scale test facility for a small light-water reactor in 2007. The company dates its own story to “a university research project in 2002” and lists 2007 as the formation of NuScale Power, LLC, followed in 2008 by the start of its pre-application talks with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The early years were unsteady. English Wikipedia records that the company’s first funding round closed in January 2008, and that in 2011 the assets of its largest investor were frozen in a regulatory case unrelated to NuScale, which led to most staff being laid off. Later that year the engineering group Fluor took a majority interest, which the trade newsletter The Energy Daily, quoted by Wikipedia, said saved the company. Co-founder Paul G. Lorenzini was succeeded as chief executive in December 2012 by John Hopkins, who still led NuScale when World Nuclear News reported on the company in November 2023.

NuScale became a public company in May 2022, when it merged with the special-purpose acquisition company Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia; the company describes itself as the first SMR technology provider to go public. Wikipedia places its headquarters in Tigard, Oregon, in the Portland area, with offices that have included Corvallis and Richland, Washington.

One module, several plant sizes.

NuScale’s product is the NuScale Power Module, a small pressurised light-water reactor built as a single factory-made unit and set, with others, in a shared pool below ground. The company markets plants of four, six and twelve modules, and says a twelve-module plant can reach up to 924 megawatts of electricity.

Its licensing record is the spine of the brand. NuScale says that in 2020 it became the first SMR to receive design approval from the NRC. The NRC’s press release of 29 May 2025 says the earlier US600 design was certified by the NRC in 2023, and that on that day the agency approved the standard design of the US460, a six-module plant of 77 megawatts per module, producing about 460 megawatts in all. The NRC said it had accepted that application for review in July 2023 and finished ahead of schedule. A standard design approval, the NRC explained, means a design meets the agency’s requirements; anyone wishing to build one must still apply for permission to build and operate it.

Manufacturing began with partners. World Nuclear News reported in November 2023 that NuScale had placed its first order for long-lead materials with the Korean firm Doosan Enerbility at the end of 2022, and NuScale says Doosan began production forgings for the first modules in 2023.

The company’s first planned plant did not go ahead. On 8 November 2023, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) and NuScale said they had mutually agreed to end the Carbon Free Power Project, a six-module plant planned at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls and pencilled in for operation by 2029. World Nuclear News, reporting on 9 November 2023, quoted the partners as saying the project appeared unlikely to have enough subscription to continue. English Wikipedia adds that NuScale cut about 28 percent of its staff afterwards.

Design and documentation.

Nuclear companies sell to a small number of buyers — utilities, governments and regulators — over very long timescales, and their imagery tends to reflect that. Corporate pages and reports often return to the same few scenes: cooling towers and reactor domes photographed under clear skies, turbine halls in clean, even light, and wide views of plants set against water or open country.

Newer reactor designers, many of which have not yet built a commercial plant, lean on renders instead. Small modular plants appear as low, compact buildings in green landscapes, sometimes beside a town or a data centre, with no smoke and few people. Large-reactor vendors show construction sites, cranes and heavy components such as reactor vessels and steam generators on the move, a way of picturing scale and progress at once.

People appear mostly as engineers in hard hats and overalls, inspecting a weld, reading a control-room screen or handling fuel. Two images recur across the trade: the blue Cherenkov glow of a spent-fuel or research-reactor pool, caused by charged particles travelling through water faster than light does in it, and ceramic fuel pellets held in a gloved hand. Both are used to make an invisible process visible.

The industry also presents itself in person, at trade gatherings such as the World Nuclear Exhibition and the meetings of the American Nuclear Society, where stands, renders and scale models carry much of the message. The companies in this guide range from Framatome, founded in 1958, and Urenco, set up by treaty in the early 1970s, to much younger reactor designers, and their visual languages vary just as widely.

Approvals, partners and pending plants.

Since the Idaho project ended, NuScale has worked through partners. English Wikipedia says an alliance formed in September 2022 with ENTRA1 Energy gave ENTRA1 global exclusive rights to commercialise and deploy NuScale plants, with NuScale concentrating on the modules themselves. NuScale says that in 2025 it supported ENTRA1’s agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to deploy up to six gigawatts of NuScale capacity across TVA’s region; that is a plan, not a plant under construction.

In Romania, the planned plant at Doicești has moved through engineering studies. NuScale says Phase 1 of the front-end engineering and design work was completed in 2023 and Phase 2 in 2025; English Wikipedia says the Romanian nuclear operator Nuclearelectrica made a decision in principle in February 2026 to invest in a six-module plant, subject to a funding plan, with the first module planned to operate in 2033. In Poland, World Nuclear News reported in November 2023 that a plan by the copper and silver producer KGHM to build a NuScale-based plant had been approved by the climate ministry. None of these plants was operating at the time of writing.

Outside power plants, NuScale runs Energy Exploration (E2) Centers, control-room simulators placed at universities. The company lists the first at Oregon State in 2020 and later centres at institutions including Seoul National University, the University Politehnica of Bucharest, The Ohio State University and the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission.

For a design guide, NuScale shows how a young engineering company builds a brand from regulatory milestones, named modules and university roots rather than from a finished plant. Compare Doosan, whose Enerbility unit makes the module forgings, and TerraPower, another US reactor developer. For this guide we use navy, a reactor-pool blue and a cooling teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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