We introduce an exact numerical technique to solve the nuclear pairing Hamiltonian and to determine properties such as the even-odd mass differences or spectral functions for any element within the periodic table for any number of nuclear shells. In particular, we show that the nucleus is a system with small entanglement and can thus be described efficiently using a one-dimensional tensor network (matrix-product state) despite the presence of long-range interactions. Our approach is numerically cheap and accurate to essentially machine precision, even for large nuclei. We apply this framework to compute the even-odd mass differences of all known lead isotopes from $^{178}$Pb to $^{220}$Pb in the very large configuration space of 13 shells between the neutron magic numbers 82 and 184 (i.e., two major shells) and find good agreement with the experiment. To go beyond the ground state, we calculate the two-neutron removal spectral function of $^{210}$Pb which relates to a two-neutron pickup experiment that probes neutron-pair excitations across the gap of $^{208}$Pb. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of our method to treat pairing with non-zero angular momentum. This is numerically more demanding, but one can still determine the lowest excited states in the full configuration space of one major shell with modest effort, which we demonstrate for the $N=126$, $Zgeq 82$ isotones.
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