Probably more like 5 to 10. I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure a photovoltaic cell is down to 50% of its max energy production in that time frame. Nuclear doesn't give a fuck, give it water and fuel rods and it's on. And with Small Modular Reactors, you can even get them to smaller and more isolated communities. Solar's great for off-the-grid applications, I'm not going to shit on it where it's actually useful, but for baseload? Forget about it, nuclear with natural gas and/or coal to handle surges and such? Can't beat it.
So first we need to make a differential: There are multiple types of solar.
Photovoltaic solar, the one most people think about, is good for "last mile grid alleviation". Basically put some panels on roofs to offset consumption, and you reduce consumption of delivered power, the most expensive kind. As long as you are in a sunny area, good quality panels will generate more wattage than was used to produce them easily.
There is also Thermal Solar, where you have the big mirror arrays focusing sun to a single point. These have a lot of potential, that is, since you are just using the sun to heat something, that something - called a thermal mass or thermal transfer - will still be hot after the sun goes down so Thermal Solar is the only solar that can still produce power at night.
But you have to build them in the literal no where desert because if it is cloudy they just don't work, and they still haven't figured out a good medium to use for the thermal mass, partly because you need something that can handle wild, wild temperature swings - and all those materials are very toxic so the hippies get uppity about them. also anything that enters the invisible solar death zone will go PIFF. They have a test one of these in California and there are pictures of birds flying past and getting instantly vaporizes as they recieve the Ants-under-magnifying-glass treatment.
Basically hippies continue to fuck up their own cause because the solution isn't perfect.
There is also passive solar, where you just use the sun to heat something up. My father had some Window Boxes he would put out in the winter that were plexiglass-topped squre conduit and they would make a small but noticable difference. I have a friend who has passive-solar set up on his roof he uses to boost the efficiency of his heat-pump water heater. His roof is covered in a winding path of black pipes that he slowly pumps a water-based fluid through. The sun heats the pipe, which heats the fluid, which then goes into the heatpump and dramatically raises the efficiency.
Anyway, there also isn't just one type of Photovoltiac. There are a bunch of chemistries and materials that will turn light into electricity. Cheap PV will degrade in 5-10 years or less, but good quality ones will run for 20 years+. before losing power. My friend has panels from Korea that are warrantied to still be putting out 90% after 20 years (that is, they will replace his hold panel set up if they aren't doing 90% at 20) and the promise (that is backed up by nothing) they will do 50%+ for over 40.
There are lowere-efficiency PVs (I forget the chemistry but we've had them since at least the 50s) that will last pretty much forever, but the output on them is ass, 1-3% iirc.
Ones inside your calculator are usually a decent mix of longevity and poweroutput, but have issues with unfiltered UV unless treated (read; expensive) and weather-fastness.
Oh boo hoo. This spic had to shut down his buisness apparently because ICE showed up. Why buddy? You and your workers are legal, right?
Fuck this guy. If your workers were documented you wouldn't have this problem. Fuck you for enabling your fellow invading spics to ruin a good country. Go back and fix mexico you anchor baby.
Not really politcal but I talked to the curator of a steamboat museum recently and there's essentially no good wood left, as we've used all the ancient trees after the 1900s. Here's a neat video about it.
Not exactly true but also true.
What this guy doesn't take into account is the loss of the ability to harvest (or at least harvest at scale) three hardwood trees in North America:
Elm, Ash, and American Chestnut. American Chestnut being the real one that has hurt the most.
Elm has been plagued by Dutch Elm disease for a while. The species isn't threatened, but most of the naturally occuring groves of high-percentage Elm are harvested and tree farmers aren't planting new trees en-masse because they take decades to grow and your decades-long investment might be wiped out by Dutch Elm.
Ash is relatively more recent; it was starting to get popular and then the Emerald Borer arrived from Asia. The species is under extreme threat due to this invasive insect. The containement protocol is immediate destruction of infected trees, treatment of healthy trees, and then thinning out stands until Ashes are at least 60 feet away from the nearest Ash, as the bugs won't be able to reach uninfected trees at that distance unless infected wood is brought nearby. So having to space trees out like this his, and the risk of losing your harvest if the bugs appear, has virtually ended North American ash as a timber species. Ash you see on the market is European/Asian, or boutique: individual trees or stands that are sold by individuals, or extremely high end timberers willing to put up with the bullshit and risks, and also deal with the federal regulations on transport.
American Chestnut is nearly/functionally extinct thanks to a fungus from asia. It was called the Redwood of the East where they would grow to 100ft+ heights. But unlike slow-growing redwood, where they need about a century to reach harvest size*, American Chestnut was fast growing and you could have lumber quality trees in as little as 30, but usually 50+. The loss of American chestnut has had a knock-over effect because the chestnuts would feed the entire forest.
They thought the species was extinct outside of labs, but someone discovered and intact stand back in the 90s. There are efforts in... Viriginia IIRC to try to create an infection-resistant hybrid, but they are using genetic samples from Asian Chestnut which is virtually unaffected by the fungus
(to tl;dr, American Chestnut goes tall and straight, asian chestnut grows crooked and kinky, so when Asian chestnut detects a fungal colony it kinks around into a gall/burl and isolates the infection. American chestnut doesn't so the fungus spreads to the entire truck and kills everything above the roots. They are trying to insert genes to allow the tree's limbs to generate burls when infected, but without causing the trunk to fuck up)
Elm and Chestnut starting dying out in the early 1900s.
They are also ignoring perhaps the greatest, silent timber resources: Japanese Cedar. tl;dr, post WWII they planted thousands upon thousands of Japanese cedar trees. Those trees are now to the age where they NEED to be harvested or they will start dying (which isnt' an issue in natural forests as trees would be dying of old age sporadically, but in these cases these trees are all planted very close in age, so you could have forests full of dead wood - which will breed disease and is a fire risk).
Japan isn't really pushing them internationally (because its not eco-friendly to timber a forest even if that's why the forest was planted in the first place) and IIRC there is a bunch or retaliatory lumber tariff bullshit. The wood also isn't of exceptional quality, but its excellent construction material.
There are also big stands of Japanese Cherry planted under the same program, but these are not being unexploited. Sort of; a large percentage of the harvest is illegal to sell outside of Japan. Its required to be used domestically for various "cultural" industries, and Japanese Cherry heartwood so so dense you have to use special tools and processes to handle it effectively.
*There are ways to reduce this time by basically harvesting a tree but leaving the roots, allowing the roots to sent up new shoots and then pruning shoots down to a single tree, but its still multiple decades.
I do procurement and we've got a couple of companies we buy wood from and one is very obviously better quality. America also lost one of its best trees, the American Chestnut, when they were almost entirely wiped out by a blight from, to no one's surprise, China about a century ago. There's still some survivors, but they're significantly smaller and lower quality.
They are working to try to fix it, but even if they perfected the fungal-resistant hybrids tomorrow we're 50+ years away from harvestable trees. Given the investment vs. risk, that is tree farmers would want to see successful stands grown and harvested, its more likely we're at least a century out from the American Chestnut's return to market.
When you see Chestnut on the market now it is either:
-New-old stock; either recycled from other sources or logs fished up from sawmill ponds or logging rivers. There is some stretch of IIRC the Mississippi that had hundreds of sunken felled chestnut laying at the bottom a company was making a good business on fishing up and processing the logs. They were selling it for ridiculous premiums not just because its old-growth, and not just because its a nearly vanished species, but because it was "eco friendly".
-Allegany or Ozark Dwarf Chestnut or "chinkapin" (especially for veneers). These are smaller and wood isn't as good.
-Asian chestnut that has been carefully cultivated to force it grow reasonably straight. Quality is still ass compared to American Chestnut.
". I couldn't help but wonder why he values this link to a country he has never been to so highly. A link that is tenuous at best; probably one great great great grandparent or something was Irish, therefore Ireland could be claimed as his heritage. But why not America first and foremost? 
