What if the leading US small modular reactor project is cancelled?
Cost overruns killing the leading US SMR project freeze utility orders and crash SMR equities, read across as an AI-capex/power-supply setback plus risk-off into Nasdaq and high-beta crypto. Direct analogue: NuScale/UAMPS cancellation (Nov 2023), which gutted the name and chilled the sector. Forward angle: if SMRs slip, the AI power gap gets backfilled by gas turbines and grid gas — so this is bearish nuclear-equity but quietly bullish natural-gas demand, a pair the cascade misses.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Cost overruns kill the leading US small-modular-reactor project, freezing utility orders and crashing SMR equities. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.