Re: Half the population—
The molten salt SMRs in the report are Thorium based - you will also find it back in current reporting on international collaborations such as taking place between Europe and China in the Taishan plan which was ready before all the other participants. There's a part of that at Hinkley Point too.
I can't quite see any solid fuel (pebble) based reactors being tested, but I haven't looked that hard.
It's a good thing there's a lot of international collaboration on this, but the harsh reality is that China has presently the best manufacturing capabilities plus a seriously good incentive to get on with it as it helps a lot with their pollution issues. Anything that cuts down on fossil fuels is a win there, also because it cuts costs and dependency.
Where it gets interesting is that these modern reactors start to change the price equation. Nuclear energy has not been cheap due to fuel inefficiency, the need for extreme long storage of waste and all the safety measures that have emerged to barely cope with degradation and calamities.
These new reactors, however, use stupidly cheap fuel that is nigh ubiquitous and cheap to prep (so no natural resource blackmail required), and actually use some of that very dangerous original nuclear waste to get the reaction going, turning it into something with a much lower halflife, and they fail safe due to different operating principles. They're also much smaller, which makes them suitable for point solutions where previously nobody would have even considered a nuclear reactor.
The result is clean continuous energy at a competitive price point, based on a resource that is nigh impossible to exhaust. The one place where this will not be welcomed is in the country that relies on oil sales in their national currency to prop it up: the US dollar. They're *not* going to be happy with that..