This headline from the @LATimes isn't just blatantly false and misleading; it's also the result of

[hunter]

91. Depleted uranium is similar to thorium as a fuel and there are large stockpiles of it.

There's over a million tonnes of the stuff stashed away in various nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

Thorium is another element that's present in certain kinds of mining wastes.

Light water reactors use only a small fraction of the potential energy in their fuel. This used fuel can be reused in other sorts of reactors. Most of this lightly used nuclear fuel is sitting around, going nowhere, doing nothing.

wikipedia

There's no shortage of potentially fissionable fuels that have already been mined. It's just less trouble to enrich fresh uranium straight from the mines.

Reactors that use thorium or depleted uranium are typically "breed and burn" designs. Non-fissionable elements such as thorium or uranium-238 capture neutrons and are transmuted into elements that are fissionable.

One of the supposed benefits of thorium reactors is that it's much more difficult to produce bomb making materials in them.

Unfortunately that water has already passed under the bridge. The Hanford Site started producing plutonium over 75 years ago. Making bombs is an old technology; there are few secrets left. But it still requires a great deal of technical sophistication and industrial might. Any nation with that level of technical sophistication and industry isn't going to mess around trying to divert used nuclear fuel from carefully monitored commercial power plants. They'll build their own uranium enrichment plants or plutonium production reactors. That lesson was learned a long time ago from India where plutonium was diverted from a "peaceful purposes" reactors acquired from Canada and the U.S.A.. This may have been implicitly allowed as a deterrent to China.