As to IC2 Experimental being Gregtech lite, it's substantially less than Gregtech. Real 1.6 Gregtech is nuts.
You can't make electricity at all until you have steel.
You can't run a nuclear reactor at all until you can make a mining laser (which is a component of the thermal centrifuge), which requires a minimum of 9 red garnet, 96 glowstone dust (+ all the tin, copper, and centrifuging to get that to a 360k coolant cell), 2 titanium, 2 advanced alloy, a diamond, and Stainless Steel (for an industrial centrifuge to make your helium coolant, which requires a 2000k temp blast furnace (Yeah, that's a lot of iron and steel and mind numbing circuit+advanced circuit production), and at least one chrome dust).
I'm on Minecraft day 450 and am not even close.
edit: (When I state the minimum requirements above, that's for the first one; subsequent mining lasers will use leftover garnet lenses, and of course, benefit from the infrastructure you already created to build the first)