Every single study shows it saving money in the long run. It's already in use and doesn't cause problems because professionals spend more thought and time on it than armchair internet engineers. You're tilting at windmills.

a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.

I mean maybe if our cities existed in Antarctica and experience 3"+ of snow per hour nearly every day year round and we insisted on keeping 40% of our city footprint as roads. How are cities currently running these systems? Somehow I haven't heard of any of them building extra nuclear reactors or going broke?

You realize that power use fluctuates and thermal energy storage is a dead simple, ancient technology? That the majority of snowfall happens overnight when power demand is at a minimum? You're just waving around napkin math with no concept of how anything actually works.

It's usually heavy industry that's providing that. If you don't have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.

So we're just making things up now? CHP plants no longer exist? 17k water treatment plants and 4k datacenters using a combined 8-10% of all US power just vanished? Renewable power surpluses no longer need to be stored?

There's perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths

Isn't the goal in reducing car based infrastructure to cut the number of roads and make infrastructure more efficient? Instead of scaling heating costs to be smaller and more manageable you'd rather keep the fixed costs of a full vehicle fleet and the fixed damage of plowing and deicing? Your argument makes no sense at any scale.

If you want to talk about energy waste how about starting with the kWh you spend defying basic common sense over the internet.