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A matter of scale, distance & speed. (assuming we are talking about electrically driven engines like ion drives or the proposed EM engine.)

If nothing else, the sun gets weaker the further away you get. Out at the edges of the solar system it's almost negligible.

Given that mass directly effects net thrust & fuel range, smaller craft working in the inner solar system may well be better off sticking with solar over a bulky reactor.

Larger and or longer ranged ships should start to favour fusion reactors and such.

Unless of course they manage to miniaturise the fusion apparatus, or perhaps harness quantum effects like matter/anti-matter. etc. etc.

Surface area to volume ratio also starts to shaft solar power the bigger the ship gets too. The panels would have to get exponentially bigger along with the ship/engines.

I couldn't tell you exactly where, but there will be natural tipping points between the practicality of one over the other.

Edit: The calculation would mostly be the ratio of energy produced to mass of the generating apparatus. The point where a fusion reactor (inc it's fuel) can produce more required power per unit of mass than solar cells (and associated gubbins), is the point where it becomes more efficient for most spacecraft.

Though solar still has a clear advantage where indefinite operational duration is a factor. (fusion requires fuel, albeit in small quantities)

Because the Sun doesn't have a convenient plug socket

There are some pesky logistical problems in harnessing even a fraction of the suns output.

It's not that it can't be done but.......we could instead just make our own fun sized suns like these people are trying to do.

Nothing else could really touch the output of a fusion reactor if (when) they finally nail it.

Not that solar cells wouldn't still have their niches, or a stopgap role in the mean time.

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Why are we building fusion reactors when there is a giant, natural one already there that gives us all the power we could ever need?

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I don't know what's more impressive. The entire experience, or the fact that there is a camera inside the reactor.

Amazing stuff through and through.

I wonder how this affects fusion reactors already being build and tested. Is it back to the drawing board then?

As others have mentioned there are indeed still major issues to solve. But, they are slowly crawling to the answer (for some reason the US has just a "little bit" of interest in this--though if they go ahead and name their scientists as the sole awesomeness that thought how to make this a reality one day... I will truly hate my government for sure...

Hopefully, this reactor can give us some good data (and also hopefully was built with new processes across the board; again giving the scientists more data) on what's working better and what's failing either worse or @the same rate... There are about three main issues that need to be solved before we can call it "somewhat quits" (but, even after that, this would be a machine that needs a careful eye and constant monitoring).

I'm looking forward to the International Committee's Fusion Reactor in 2019~, called: ITER. It'll kind of be the "LHC" of the fusion world... They probably will figure out the issue with radiation destroying/eating away the guards/shields on the insides for the plasma.

These things are definitely awesome to see...

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Sorry to jump the thread here; not sure if dubious is the word either, but pretty amateur and more fear mongering with no supporting data.

First, the suggestion that no more reactors should be built because people use them to aid in production of nuclear weapons. Well kids, that ship has already sailed: In June 2014, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that nine nations (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possessed approx. 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. So someone builds one or 10 more? Yeah, that will matter. Someone needs to read up on the concept of deterrence.

When talking about waste: "Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around" - well, that's just horseshit.

Regarding accidents and number of deaths due to nuclear reactors: "devastating disasters every 30 years" - devastating? Come on, people died, but compared to other sources of energy, according to the WHO, it is by far the safest. Consider:

Energy Source Mortality Rates; Deaths/yr/TWh

Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

So, if not dubious, certainly cheap and pedantic.

Well according to the clip of Stallone's arm wrestling show, apparently drinking automobile oil before a match does NOT make you stronger or better at it (much like Popeye and a can of spinach). BUT, it does seem to show that it has the ability to induce a superpower allowing a seemingly normal person to become schizophrenic...

BTW, I said superpower rather than mental illness, because from the schizophrenic individual's perspective he is surely battling Hell's most dangerous beasts, demons, and devils. Merely with the power of his arm wrestling techniques backed up by the miniature fission based nuclear reactor in his gut. It also leaves him in a perpetual manic state, where much like the Lego Movie, "Everything Is Awesome"...

I imagine that he may upgrade to a mixture of anti-freeze and power steering fluids; absolutely logical.

/insanity
//off-topic

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.