Half that - it sounds like the proof of concept is done (announced in 2013, this article seems to confirm they finished that), 5 years to the operational prototype and 10 years to production.

Lockheed has tight military ties and the military doesn't have to obey NRC regulatory restrictions and can do basically anything they want. It would not surprise me if they built one or more of these for the military before they even started trying to push one through the NRC. It also is a good way to avoid the nuclear lobby, which would do everything in its power to delay construction of such a reactor for as long as possible (because their clients have a vested interest in this technology failing).

Which, as other posters have said, that exhaust is awfully hot, curious to how it would be contained without melting stuff. You certainly could use a Brayton Cycle turbine by keeping that heat relatively high with whatever you heat with it (but MUCH, MUCH cooler than the vented plasma).

Even with fission if we just built breeder reactors the hundred thousand year storage becomes a 300 year storage problem (and you'll have much less of it to store).

Whenever you're talking Deuterium-Tritium reactions, you're talking about fusion. The article is suggesting submarines and aircraft carriers could carry this fusion reactor rather than their current fission reactors.

It sounds like they built a half sized prototype promised in 2013 (this does not demonstrate fusion, it proves the plasma containment works - now they need to prove it can scale and hook it to a generator):
"Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years"

and also
"McGuire said. A small reactor could power a U.S. Navy warship, and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges.
U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fission reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."

There is a video link from 2013 higher up on this page, and here's the wiki page. It looks like they found a more compact means of containment as opposed to a tokamak. They also disclose that they then generate a plasma by using RF energy (it's a microwave!), but suggests they have not actually heated this up to fusion temperatures in their 1/2 scale reactor and need to build a 100MW test reactor to do that. Models suggest it will scale. They also suggest that the plasma could go to even greater temperatures, meaning other elements could potentially be fused.

The chance of earth becoming like Venus is pretty slim due to composition of the two planets, but the runaway greenhouse effect is definitely something worth looking into. The planet definitely could become hostile to life.

And yeah, the majority of energy the earth gets is nuclear in some way if you count just heating the planet into the equation. Solar and geothermal harvest nuclear energy from the sun and earth. Wind and Hydro use gravitational energy, and the other main one is hydrocarbon based (oil and coal). Too bad the majority of man-made energy is still hydrocarbon based.

Well the biggest hurdle to fusion has always been getting the initial sustainable reaction and getting more power out than was put in. Stuff like containment was largely solved long ago (though there are several solutions and even more being worked on). If I had to venture a guess, the initial reaction problem is what they solved.

Yeah, but power plant nuclear reactors are very different than spacecraft nuclear reactors. Most people seem to have this misconception that all fission reactors are the same and most spacecraft use radioactive decay reactors (called RTGs). You can read spacecraft reactors here

Unfortunately, this study included "casual" gaming like Candy Crush and not serious gaming (like console or PC) where the numbers still skew highly towards males. Still, it's a start.

It is not that wind turbines aren't more dangerous than other sources, it is that they are dangerous to certain species such as bald eagles. Conservationists have even sued the government over it.

Well with nuclear, current plants are extremely expensive to build and very fuel inefficient. Gen IV promised to remove that inefficiency but America has publicly pretty much abandoned Gen IV (but some companies are still developing various reactors in private). Russia, on the other hand, is just getting rolling and has already sold some Gen IV fast breeder reactors to China. Going from .5-5% fuel efficiency to roughly 70% is a huge step, and that could be 99.5% with reprocessing, but reprocessing always gets squashed because it leads to "proliferation" (which could be avoided by making some parts of reprocessing a closed system, especially protactinium, or even leaving protactinium in the reactor, though you won't get 99.5% efficiency if you do that).

Either by bridging the gap between line and pole (usually larger birds) or hitting the line itself, which apparently can be hard for them to see in bad weather.

1) While I don't know specifics, I'm sure streaming, probably oct-trees, and possibly compression/decompression of nodes in the oct-tree.

2) You need to add or modify the scene in an editor and create animations if you want those. No dynamic lighting or shadows at this time, pending hardware advances (it can be done, just not very well in realtime).

3) Laser scanning can quickly build rooms identical to real world rooms without having to go in and model everything. The flaw with it is anything behind any blocking objects won't be seen, so I suspect you end up with a partial model of a room. It is great if you want to observe the world from a single point, but most of the time you want to move around (this is my main skepticism so far). It is possible maybe with software to take several laser readings and then assemble the complete room. As I said, though, this is where I'm skeptical.

At the end of the video they say they can do animations and a demo of it will be coming soon. With them, that means around 2016+, but other companies and researchers have demonstrated voxel rendering and RAGE proves animation can be done with it.

Early graphics hardware was designed to texture triangles and didn't contain a bunch of highly parallel general purpose units like today's graphics hardware. Since raycasting (and raytracing) and voxels can be done in parallel, voxels are making more sense again. You can make entirely unique terrain without overlapping and blending a bunch of textures using disk streaming methods and some structure (Carmack used a sparse voxel octtree in RAGE [here's a BSD licensed example of a sparse volume octtree).

But as I said in other posts, don't expect fancy lighting and shadows until next gen cards are available (in fact, they maybe are by now, but they're way out of my price range).