And we had a proof of concept for tokamaks in the 50s.
There are several aspects of this announcement which cause me to disregard it. First of all, there doesn't seem to be any journal article describing the work. I'm of the impression that science journalists are mostly full of shit and one must go to the primary sources to get any semblance of reality. Where are the technical documents?
The idea of a magnetic mirror is not new. For a state-of-the-art mirror system, take a look at the Gas Dynamic Trap. You see that it's mostly science and not hype. There's plenty of actual journal articles and technical documents. (With Lockheed, we are supposed to just take their word for it, based on their layman explanations to journalists?) Note that scientists working on GDT are much more modest about what is realistically attainable using this technology. A fusion reactor based on GDT technology would be 1km long [AA Ivanov and VV Prikhodko. PPCF 55 (2013) 063001], and so people look at it more as a neutron source for fusion material research than a viable reactor concept.
Lockheed spokespeople were making the claim that they could develop more quickly than tokamaks due to the small size of the system. Well, you know, first generation tokamaks were also pretty small. We have a good understanding of how reactor parameters will scale with size, and that's why ITER is so large. (The original plan for ITER was even larger, in order to guarantee ignition (fusion gain=infinity), but we have scaled back our ambitions to achieve a fusion gain of 10.)