And that's the big hope of these massive consumers wanting to build their own SMR/micro reactors.
Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.
But they don't. That's the point. These SMR designs are mostly running naval submarine reactors on conventional Uranium cycles - which is why there's a lot of regulatory (nuclear proliferation) concerns about having small units deployed in many locations (as opposed to a handful of sites with large scale reactors).
In fairness, Thorium is only proliferation-resistant when used in a light water reactor - it still generates some nasties when used in a molten-salt reactor.
The problem with all this is:
* Grid-scale nuclear power stations are expensive - private industry can't raise/won't commit that much capital.
* Novel reactor designs/fuel cycles are expensive - private industry can't raise/won't commit that much capital.
* Much of the world's political thinking is still in thrall to a lite version of Reaganomics and so governments won't make those investments.
* Small nuclear sub-type reactors are somewhat in the reach of the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft, even though they're less efficient than their grid-scale counterparts.
So that's what we end up with. Just as our big uranium-cycle grid reactors are ultimately derived from military breeder reactor tech, so the SMRs are just a scaled-up version of submarine tech. But it's still not actually a good fit for power production or long-term waste management.
Basically, they're all investing in the compromised designs that the military already paid for, because it's what the private sector is willing to pay for. Even though we could - as a society - get much better value for money out of doing the research and deploying low waste, proliferation-resistant technologies en masse.
It also means we spend a lot less time negotiating with the likes of Iran about "honestly, our nuclear programme is peaceful". We can just hand them the IP for a proliferation-resistant thorium reactor. We can even offer to build it for them. If they say "no thanks" then they're fessing up that their programme is a weapon programme (which yes, we know, but it just cuts the crap. Anyone shows any interest in nukes, we hand them a power plant and see if they actually want it. It instantly closes down any discussion on refining uranium).