> Are there safe breeder reactor designs?
Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.
> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?
Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.
> bad publicity
Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.
> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site
They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.
> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?
Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.
> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?
Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.
> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"
The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?
> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?
Like this [1] ;)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4