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It was this statement that caught the eye of most reviewers and was the headline in a ''[[New York Times]]'' article covering the speech, subtitled "It will be too cheap for our children to meter, Strauss tells science writers."{{sfn|Times|1954}} Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on ''[[Meet the Press]]''. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."{{sfn|Wellock|2016}}
The statement was contentious from the start. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission itself, in testimony to the U.S. Congress only months before, lowered the expectations for fission power, projecting only that the costs of reactors could be brought down to about the same as those for conventional sources.<ref>{{cite magazine |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,893336,00.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081214124118/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,893336,00.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=December 14, 2008 |title=ATOMIC ENERGY: The Nuclear Revolution |magazine=Time Magazine |date=6 February 1956}}</ref> A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://cns-snc.ca/media/media/toocheap/toocheap.html |title=Too Cheap to Meter? |first=M.J. |last=Brown |date=14 December 2016 |website=Canadian Nuclear Society}}</ref> [[James T. Ramey]], who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously."{{sfn|Wellock|2016}}
The phrase has also been attributed to [[Walter Marshall, Baron Marshall of Goring|Walter Marshall]], a pioneer of [[nuclear power]] in the United Kingdom.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/792209.stm |title=Nuclear doubts gnaw deeper |newspaper=[[BBC News]] |date= 15 June 2000}}</ref> There is no documentary evidence that he invented or used the term.
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