Re: 'Too cheap to meter' . . .
Why do you have to build huge gigawatt reactor complexes? Why not smaller ones, say enough to run a part of town (or an entire small town), with a backup on site? The hydro plants could be diverted to "big jobs" or supply a part of the overall grid.
Waste disposal - this is bear, yes - but I still can't see why some of the huge savings of an established, distributed nuke grid could not be plowed into digging extremely deep storage mines.
Mines need not be wide, just very deep. Automated drillers could bore down for miles - even to the aesthenosphere (remember the "Moho" project?). Once in place you only need throw the waste in and cap the mine when at some determined capacity.
Also, since you've been around the whole time, when did people *really* start to think of nukes as evil? Even I remember as a kid talks of "free unlimited energy" from nukes.
edit: Project Mohole [link|http://www7.nationalacademies.org/archives/amsoc.html|http://www7.national...chives/amsoc.html]
It also occurs to me you could use hydrogen devices for mining storage cavities - drill a very deep hole, set off a really big nuke, instant spherical chamber :)
