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Do the newer small reactor designs effectively discourage proliferation? I'm not familiar with the nuclear specifics, but it seems like the risk factor of your average tinpot dictator seizing the plants and using them to generate plutonium for weapons remains. I could see it working within friendly jurisdictions, though.
While this is true for electricity generation, especially in tropical latitudes, last I heard it isn't as practical as you might like for heating applications in colder climates. There isn't a storage technology today that can convert, say, Canada's long summer days into heating on its cold, long winter nights. And unfortunately most sources tend to mix "energy" and "electricity" breakdown in ways that make overall consumption numbers difficult to evaluate. Canada primarily heats houses with forced-air furnaces (combustion) and electric baseboard (which follows the grid's energy sources -- in winter -- which varies by province).
A complete elimination of fossil fuels probably requires a wholesale shift to electric (ideally heat pump) heating, which I only rarely see accounted for in energy discussions: it quite possibly changes grid energy usage patterns enough to require even more generation, and some substantive transmission changes.
They do.
A lot of modern designs are made to be modular, operated sealed for years and refuelled only in factory. Breeding plutonium next to the reactor can be prevented by sealing access.
Power plants today have links and continual monitoring. No big deal with internet.
Proliferation isn't really the problem...
I'd be curious to read more if you have any sources to recommend. I'm less concerned for this particular point about proliferation while the plant is monitored and controlled from the West and more about a dictator that nationalizes it and is free to (ignoring workplace safety, as is dictatorial tradition) disassemble it and focus on a weapons program. But I'm not really an expert here, so perhaps that's not the concern, or we just exclude countries at risk of such things, although that hasn't been the most predictable in the past.
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New York has already banned new natural gas hookups in favor of everyone being stuck with barely-any-heat pumps. And they're shutting down generation, not building new; they tried to get New Jersey to generate for them (North Bergen Liberty Generating Station) but the NJ governor is opposed. (Personally as an NJ resident I'd say go ahead and build, and put a special tax on the power generated, the "green silliness tax")
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