You’re more or less describing cap-and-trade…

I don’t think I am. Under cap-and-trade, it’s still possible for more than a safe amount of fossil fuels to be extracted from the ground within a given time period and subsequently burned. There’s some similarity in the market mechanism, but in my scheme it’s connected to actual fossil fuel extraction, not hypothetical emissions quantities.

If suburbia was an advantageous place for them, they’d already be there. …

I don’t think the wolves are instinctively avoiding human populations. Wolves were deliberately exterminated from these places, so deliberate efforts are required to bring them back.

… high voltage transmission means that a plant can still be a few tens of kms outside of a city before transmission losses start to add up.

Transmission losses aren’t the issue. If the plants are close to where people live and work then you can take advantage of cogeneration to provide district heating and utility steam. Also, urban nuclear plants can strengthen the relationship with agricultural regions by generating hydrogen/ammonia for GHG free fertilizer.

Any sort of dirty water recovery is more efficient at the municipal scale…

I agree, but homes should already have the plumbing to automatically collect bathing and laundry water for flushing toilets. The excess can get sent to the municipal water treatment plant and set aside for industrial uses.

Seems that’s not a super easy thing to do (read expensive)…

It gets more inefficient if the pee is mixed with the rest of the wastewater, so the idea is to adapt our bathrooms to help keep it separate. Perhaps converting to composting toilets, which collect urine separately, is the way go to here to help with gray water management as well. Anyway, if recovering phosphate from urine seems expensive, that’s just relative to mining it from problematic places.