[sad Sterling Engine noises]

The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It's called agrivoltaics. And that's before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.

There simply isn't a shortage of land for solar. Unless you're talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn't a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it's an advantage that really doesn't matter much in the real world.

Solar doesn't need to use that space exclusively. You can put solar on every roof, over every parking lot, and all grazing land. You can even put it over farmland in winter and tilt the panels out of the way during summer when there's enough energy anyway. Or use semi-translucent panels over crops that don't like blazing sunlight anyway.

We use more land for golf courses than photovoltaics.. I'm not trying to say that golf courses are bad (even though they're not exactly environmental friendly) but it shows how little space photovoltaics actually need compared to other things.

Also, don't underestimate the amount of material a nuclear reactor uses. A single cooling tower of the Phillipsburg NPP weighed 32,500 metric tons. That's roughly 250-500 MW in solar panels, and then you haven't even built the reactor or the generator. I found sources talking about half a million tons per nuclear plant.

you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time

I can confirm this. My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels.

Also, the problem with having larger battery capacity to span these periods is that if they don't get fully recharged or cycled properly the batteries get damaged and eventually die. We learnt that the hard way.

Solar is the undisputed champion for 80-90% of the year but needs to be complemented with something else for the remainder, if you want uninterrupted on-demand electricity.

0 and 40 depending on location? We get 6Wh per W installed per day annual average here. We couldn't get that is 40% was the max. We get 1 to 3Wh/Wi/d in winter and 6 to 12Wh/Wi/d in summer

At midday on a cold sunny spring day we'll get 105% the nameplate power

Wh/Wi/day is Watt hours per Watt installed per day

Sometimes things just get horrifically cheap.

Could be pencils or shoes or lightbulbs or books a million one other things. Onetime they was rare and capitalism made them so common practically everyone into he world can have them.