My bases tend to be very compact multilevel affairs.
If you go here, I've got a bunch of screenshots. The screenshots with a date/time code between "2013-10-04 15-25-59-72" and "2013-10-04 15-28-59-81" (everything, at the moment) are screenshots from different angles around my base. It should be enough to give you an idea. Obviously I try to hide cables/pipes etc when possible.
I'm using Soartex Fanver, so if you don't recognize the machines... most of what you see is going to be IC2 and Forestry. In particular though,
the orange area with the skull sign is my reactor stuff. It's automatic - when power storage drops below 5% capacity it will run the reactor until the capacity is 95% full (or more). This way it's not constantly flapping on and off, and it gives my LV solar array a chance to actually do something (it's enough to run my ME storage system almost constantly - it would probably take a week real-time for it to drain enough to trigger the reactor). As well there's a thermal cutoff and a manual shutoff lever

(the memory card in the display case is a save-state for the Rednet controller, should i have to move things etc I can just upload the program instead of fiddling with it all over again)
EDIT: more on the reactor. That's an Advanced Power Monitor with the green bar. It's linked to the MFE that's below it (with the lever on it's front). The PRC (far bottom left) compares the signal from the power monitor (recall this is monitoring the MFE), the thermal monitor ("500" thing left of the reactor), and the cutoff lever (top left). Only when it has a signal from the power monitor, but NO signal from the thermal monitor or lever, will the PRC output to turn the reactor on. The lever orientation makes sense to me, but it's easy enough to flip the required signal around. Whatever floats your boat. The reactor itself is a
simple and safe design. I also have a normal generator (to the bottom-right of the whole affair, under the coal coke barrel) able to power the basic machines or charge a RE-Bat(pack) (and that's it, intentionally) - the batpack charging is meant to let me get into my ME storage if the power situation is critical. I keep a charged battery in a case above the ME system, for that.