Your post is the first I've seen about the US building new reactors, but it's worth pointing out that the pebble bed reactors currently under construction in China and South Africa, apart from being substantially safer than LWRs or PWRs, use thorium-232 (the naturally abundant isotope of thorium) as fuel. Thorium is three to four times more abundant than uranium, and much easier to obtain, as it's a byproduct of the extraction of rare earth elements from monazite sands.

If the thorium fuel cycle takes off, India, South Africa, Brazil and Australia (which all have large areas of monazite sand) stand to make a killing.