While the technology is potentially attractive, there's a fairly high startup cost associated with being an early adopter. Just to pick on one item, for example, fabricated thorium fuel elements are probably extremely expensive today, because there's no market for them. (Not much of a market for thorium, period, since they stopped putting it into lantern mantles.)
Now, if you had an already-functioning thorium energy industry, might those thorium fuel elements end up being cheaper than uranium? Yes! But that's a potential savings, not a real one, as of today.
If you want a really mind-blowing tech fantasy, think ... nuclear-powered spacecraft, fueled by thorium, mined from the moon. That's right, based on surveys from orbit, there's believed to be a thorium deposit on the far side of the moon that is something like 3x richer than any thorium ore found on earth.
I agree that the private sector would build it, except...for all the overhead placed on it by government.
Which is likely why you don’t see permit applications being filed. (I have no insight at all into that process, so I would take your word for it)