Why are we not using thorium reactors if they are better in every way?
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They are illegal in the US, as they are classified as breeder reactors. That’s mostly why, it was a knee jerk move in response to the threat of dirty bombs.
We don’t know (for sure) how to build them effectively. We built uranium reactors with military research. You can’t make bombs with thorium.
I had physics professor tell me there were concerns about clogging/corrosion in the cooling lines because of how they’d have to be made.
They’re not better in every way. Uranium-fueled reactors are better at generating weapons-grade nuclear material, like Plutonium-239. Because of this one advantage, superpowers like the US government have sunk many billions of dollars into R&D for uranium-fueled reactors over many decades, meaning uranium reactor technology is now far more mature than thorium reactor technology, making it relatively inexpensive and efficient because so many of its issues are already known and solved.