You can go back twenty years and Saudi Arabia was going to construct scores of thorium reactors produced by an American corporation and thus wean itself from petroleum. Ho-hum.
Yes...this entire subject is puzzling and also full of lots of statements like that. People saying this is going to happen, but nothing does.
Something is holding back development.
There is nothing that I see that would prevent some interested party from developing a test bed reactor. Even if it failed, someone should have done it. It is possible that the Enviroweenies have created a paperwork bureaucratic fortress that makes it nerly imnpossible to comply with. If not that...
Something is keeping this down, IMO.