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None of the US based SMRs have been successful, even with hundreds of millions of funding and regulatory approval from the DOE.

What can happen? The plant is pretty much working and is the only reliable point of Ukrainian power generation since it can't be targeted. Also, when is the US going to get into a land war on its own soil, and how will smaller nuclear reactors help?

You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.

So, I don't disagree that, especially for some environments, bombing resistance is a legit concern.

However, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if we find ourselves in a situation where China is bombing US power generation infrastructure, that probably means that World War III -- not some kind of limited-scale fight, but a real all-in conflict -- is on, and I think that the factors that determine what happens there probably aren't mostly going to be "who has more power plants".

World War II was a multi-year affair, but a lot of that was constrained by distance and the ability to project power. From the US's standpoint, the Axis had extremely-limited ability to affect the US. The US started with a very small army and no weapons that could, in short order, reach across the world. That meant that, certainly from a US standpoint, there was not going to be a quick resolution one way or another. There, industrial capacity was really important.

Today's environment is different.

I've not read up on what material's out there, but I'd guess that in a World War III, one of two things probably happens:

• The war goes nuclear, in which case nuclear (weapons, not power generation) capabilities in large part determine the outcome.

• The war remains conventional. One or both sides have the ability to pretty rapidly destroy the other side's air and/or missile defenses and subsequently destroy critical infrastructure to the degree that the other side cannot sustain the fight. My bet is on the US being in a stronger position here, but regardless, I don't think that what happens is each side keeps churning out hardware for multiple years and slugging the other with that hardware, being able to make use of their power generation capacity. Electrical generation capacity is a particularly important part of that, sure, but it's not the whole enchilada. Water production and distribution, electrical distribution, bridges, industrial infrastructure.

That doesn't mean that power generation capacity doesn't matter vis-a-vis military capacity. Like, let's say that China has a really great way to convert electrical generation capacity into military capacity, right? Like, they have some fully automated mega-factory that churns out long range AI-powered fighter jets, has all the raw resources they need, just keeps pouring electricity into it. And China decides -- in peacetime -- that it wants to build an enormous fighter jet force like that. Say, I don't know, a hundred thousand planes or something. Then the US, which in our hypothetical scenario doesn't have such a fully-automated-mega-factory, has a hard decision: either attack China or wait and find itself in a situation where China could defeat it in conventional terms. The ability to expand military capacity does matter.

But at the point that bombing is happening and the ability of power generation to passively-resist that bombing is a factor, you're already in a war, and then I think that a whole host of other factors start to dramatically change the environment.