Some of you may remember USNC making the rounds a few years ago. They had a growing portfolio of projects that included NASA Nuclear Thermal Propulsion, the Defense Innovation Unit's nuclear advanced propulsion and power program, a DOE reactor test at Idaho National Laboratory, a fuel manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge, a reactor demo project underway in Canada, and a reactor factory in the works that was supposed to create 250 jobs in Alabama.
The company was supposedly valued at north of $250 million but in October 2024 they filed for bankruptcy. Everything sold for $41 million, with the lion's share of the actually usable facilities and technology going to Standard Nuclear and most of the rest going to Nano Nuclear. The interim CEO who facilitated that sale, Kurt Terrani (previously the company's fuel division EVP), resigned from USNC almost immediately afterward and announced himself as CEO of Standard Nuclear at the start of 2025, which raises an entirely separate set of questions...
A complaint filed this month in Delaware bankruptcy court sums up what the trustee thinks happened in the years leading up to that. The founder and CEO, Dr. Francesco Venneri, died in February 2026, so they're suing his estate. His CCO Waqar Zaidi and CFO Ritesh Budree are also named.
The filing is pretty insane. Some of the greatest hits:
- While employees couldn't make payroll, CEO Venneri flew to Manila to have dinner with President Marcos. An exec wrote: "Things are coming apart at home. High stakes situation and the CEO is in Manilla [sic] having dinners with [President] Marcos . . . Something about a fiddle and Rome come to mind."
- CCO Zaidi secretly negotiated a finder's fee deal with Venneri conducted entirely off company email to avoid detection. When a union investment came in, Zaidi collected $750,000, while rank-and-file employees were on deferred payroll.
- The finder's fee was 4% of any investment the company received, whether Zaidi had anything to do with finding it or not.
- Zaidi's company card: $37K in business class flights in 8 months (mostly short hops between Canada and the US), $8,400 at a Manila cigar club in a single night, a $1,200 luggage set, a $2,000 iPhone, and his LinkedIn subscription.
- The company was forced to suspend all employee credit cards to avoid hitting the card's limit. Because of Zaidi.
- Zaidi emailed Venneri a new employment contract telling him it would be "valid and executed" if he didn't respond within 24 hours, writing: "USNC is in a difficult financial state bordering on insolvency with vultures circling. . . . It is only fair we protect our families and the value we created. Only way to secure protection is with written contract, as agreed to." The contract guaranteed Zaidi $1M+ severance unless he was convicted of a crime proven in state court.
- Venneri called the terms "very onerous." Signed them anyway. Then backdated the contract to dodge the newly expanded board.
- CFO Budree quietly secured his own six-month full-pay severance deal, terminable "for any reason," while knowing the company was insolvent.
- At one point there were effectively two CFOs on payroll simultaneously, neither of which had any control over the company's spiraling finances.
- A $550M investment from a major tech company was 18 months into diligence but USNC couldn't stay solvent long enough to close it. (A source I know has linked this to the Amazon investment in X-Energy, based on statements Venneri privately made about the X-E deal when it was publicly announced.)
- Venneri wrote, in his own words: "it's easy to point fingers to the former CEO who overspent . . . I have a lot to answer for." And then he died before he could actually answer for anything, lol.