An oversold nuclear bounce ran across every strait, with Oklo up 11.5% on a DOE test-reactor greenlight and enricher Centrus up 9.2%, as only GE Vernova gave ground.

Nuclear rebounded hard on Tuesday, an oversold bounce off deep year-to-date losses that lifted nearly every strait as the broad market turned risk-on. The leader was Oklo, up 11.5% to $44.27, and here the sector bid was paired with a genuine catalyst: the Department of Energy granted startup authorization for Oklo's Groves Isotope Test Reactor under its Reactor Pilot Program, clearing the company to load fuel and operate a privately financed, full-scale, low-power reactor. That lands in the SMR-and-advanced-reactor-platform chokepoint the desk tracks — the licensing-and-operation bottleneck that separates deployment stories from PowerPoint — and it dragged the rest of the platform names up with it, NuScale +8.4% to $9.81 and NANO Nuclear +5.3% to $19.24.

The only material laggard was GE Vernova, down 1.6% to $926.73 — one of a handful of red lines on an otherwise green tape, and without a company-specific catalyst. The large-scale power-and-turbine name eased after a strong run rather than on any negative news; on a day when the speculative, high-beta corners of the sector rallied, the mega-cap gave back a fraction. It reads as rotation within the sector, not a signal about the grid build-out.

The rebound was broadest in the fuel cycle. Centrus Energy — the only US-based commercial uranium enricher, licensed for HALEU and holding a DOE expansion award — led the enrichment strait up 9.2% to $193.39, with Silex Systems' ADR +5.6% to $20.83 in the laser-enrichment layer. Uranium supply and mining ran with it: Energy Fuels +7.3% to $15.97, Uranium Energy +6.1% to $13.27, Denison Mines +5.1% to $3.72, Cameco +4.6% to $106.96, and the Sprott Uranium Miners ETF +4.1% to $61.13. In heavy components, Japan Steel Works' ADR rose 9.8% to $24.10 in its most recent session — the large-forgings choke for reactor pressure vessels. The tape rewarded the physical bottlenecks of the fuel cycle over the utilities.

The calendar is measured. Solstice Advanced Materials reports Q2 on September 2, and the World Nuclear Symposium convenes in London September 9–11. The NRC's final Environmental Impact Statement for GLE's Paducah laser-enrichment facility is a near-term milestone for the enrichment strait, with BWXT's Q3 on November 2 and NANO Nuclear's fiscal Q4 on November 15. Further out, the X-Energy Xe-100 construction-permit review reaches an NRC milestone December 16, and the definitive Westinghouse/US-government agreements replacing the binding term sheet are expected in the back half of the year — the structural catalysts under the platform and fuel-fabrication choke.