Record-Breaking Fusion Lab More Than Doubles Its 2022 Energy Breakthrough
That original breakthrough was the first time scientists had ever achieved 'ignition'—a fusion reaction that generated more energy (3.15 megajoules) than the lasers put into the fuel (2.05 megajoules).
Importantly, that achievement does not take into account the amount of energy put into the system to power the reaction—essentially, 300 megajoules of energy from the plug in the wall. Nevertheless, the accomplishment indicated the tantalizing promise of nuclear fusion as a carbon-free, essentially limitless source of energy. Jill Hruby, the under secretary for nuclear security, summed it up as 'the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world.'
Fusion isn't new—scientists have been chasing it for nearly a century. The problem has always been scale: It generally costs way more energy to trigger a fusion reaction than what comes out of said reaction. The NIF's achievement changed that—for a moment, humanity replicated the energy source of stars and came out ahead.
The new surge in energy yield is a large jump for the experiment, though it's still very far off from providing a sustainable clean energy source (consider the 300 megajoules necessary to power the 2022 experiment). And that's to say nothing of building an actual fusion energy plant, and figuring out a way to produce fusion power at scale and integrate the budding technology into the world's power grid.
The system works via inertial confinement fusion, using 192 laser beams to compress a diamond-coated pellet the size of a peppercorn—basically giving it a tiny, star-like explosion inside a golden cylinder. The laser blast occurs inside a 10-meter-wide vacuum chamber, heating the fuel to over 100 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures hundreds of billion of times Earth's atmosphere. The team repeated the trick in 2023, and by the recent report, it seems the experiment's efficiency has only improved.
Experts still see big roadblocks for inertial confinement as a practical energy source. That's why other teams are pursuing other means of fusion—namely magnetic confinement, which uses magnetic fields to hold plasma—to prove that pathway to clean energy. Other projects like ITER—a massive tokamak under construction in France—are attempting to generate record amounts of energy output, though they will never be part of the energy grid.
Still, fusion's long-held reputation as a pipe dream—'always 30 years away'—might finally be changing. The engineering problems ensnaring the field are vast, but the substantial progress of NIF is an indication of the field's momentum at a time when the world is in dire need of clean energy solutions at scale.
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Clare Duffy 00:00:01 'Welcome back to Terms of Service. I'm Clare Duffy. 24-Year-old Danielle Boyer grew up speaking only a little Anishinaabemowin, the native language of her Indigenous Anishinaabe community from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Danielle Boyer 00:00:16 So I didn't grow up speaking it fluently. My grandma fluently speaks it, but in our community, generational. Language loss is very rapid. Clare Duffy 00:00:26 'It's a common challenge for Indigenous communities whose native languages are at risk of disappearing. The Harvard International Review estimates every two weeks an Indigenous language dies. But language learning resources are dwindling and difficult to access. Danielle is on a mission to change that with her interactive language-teaching robot, the Scobot. Danielle Boyer 00:00:50 So if I say hello to it, it's going to say "Boozhoo" back. Let's take a look. "Listen, what is hello? 'Boozhoo.' Boozhoo. Listen, what is thank you? 'Miigwech.' Miigwech." Clare Duffy 00:01:05 It's just one example of how technology is being used to preserve and teach endangered languages and traditions. I wanted to hear from Danielle about this effort and how this tech can be used to support these communities ethically and with their involvement. All of that right after a short break. Clare Duffy 00:01:28 Hi Danielle, thanks for being here. Danielle Boyer 00:01:30 Boozhoo, hello. Thank you so much for having me. Clare Duffy 00:01:33 So you're in your early 20s. You've already built a lot of robots in your career. Take me back to the beginning. When did you first interact with a robot or get interested in robotics? Danielle Boyer 00:01:44 'Honestly, I'd have to go way back. I remember my little sister and I were like so obsessed with reading Iron Man comics or watching the WALL-E movie or things like that. We'd see robots be presented in this cool way, and we were always like, I want to do that too. I remember we were looking and looking around for like a way to be able to build a robot and there was a local class for it, but it costs $500 to be able to participate. I grew up under the poverty line and so like that opportunity was not accessible to us. It was really discouraging at first. Clare Duffy 00:02:21 So you now run an organization called the STEAM Connection, which focuses on making technical education more accessible to youth through robotics specifically. Talk about why teaching robotics and technical skills to young people and making that accessible is important to you. Danielle Boyer 00:02:38 'I think that robots are like superpowers, because you can learn so many things through making them. You can learn electrical engineering skills, you can learning mechanical engineering skills. You can learning coding. And it's all in a project-based way. And so for me, I first started out getting into accessible robots and building robot kits that cost less than $20 to make and went to kids for free. And I've sent out 20,000 of those robots now because I believe that it's so important that students have access to these skills because when you get ahead in science and tech, you can have access to so many amazing career opportunities and you can also get involved in the world of technology to help solve problems for your community. Clare Duffy 00:03:23 Tell me a little bit more about what kinds of robots you build or robotics kits that you're sending out to kids to interact with. Danielle Boyer 00:03:31 My first robot, its name is Every Kid Gets A Robot, or EKGAR. It has a crazy acronym. It's like a little remote controlled car and basically what the students do is they build it and design it from scratch and they can just go and chase their pets around with a robot and design things and build things. Clare Duffy 00:03:46 And tell me about your newer robot, SkoBot, what kind of function does that serve? Danielle Boyer 00:03:53 The SkoBot is my baby. So the SkoBot is a language revitalization robot. My language is called Anishinaabemowin, and it's an endangered Indigenous language. So I'm Anishinaabe from the Sioux tribe, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And many Indigenous languages are endangered. UNESCO said that by the year 2050, only 20 Indigenous languages will be left. That's soon! Like that's within all of our lifetimes. That's really, really scary. And when you lose your language, you lose such a key component of your culture and of your ways. I feel so much fear because like, it's the way that we communicate about the world around us is the way we tell stories. And the fact that we've seen so much loss, especially after COVID and the loss of elders and things like that, that's a really scary thing. Language is really important. And for me, I love robots, right? So I was like, I wonder if there's a way that we could bring these things together to make language learning accessible and fun for kids, right. And so I kind of started on that journey to build a language revitalization robot that you can actually speak back and forth in Anishinaabemowin, and it speaks in children's voices. Clare Duffy 00:05:12 Okay, so I want to hear a little bit more about how it works and how you built it, but tell me a little more about your relationship with your language and your culture. Is Anishinaabemowin something that you grew up speaking? Danielle Boyer 00:05:25 'A lot of our grandparents speak it, and then our parents speak a little bit of it, and then we speak even less of it. It's a really scary thing to see how fast you can lose a language in your community and how few fluent speakers there are. In many of our communities, it's only a handful of people. And so the desire to build my robot and bring language revitalization into kind of like a tech and robotic-centered space. Was based around that experience of mine of learning my language and my sister learning our language and us learning it together and being like, wow, this is really difficult. There aren't a lot of resources. And I believe that all of our youth should be learning our languages. Clare Duffy 00:06:08 So give me the Cliffs Notes version of how you built the SkoBot. Talk to me about what went into that process. Danielle Boyer 00:06:15 Yeah, so I got together with two of my mentors. One is Navajo and Acoma Pueblo and the other is Taino. So very, very different Indigenous communities from my own. One of my mentors is a speech language pathologist. So basically we got together and we were inspired by Talking Elmo. Clare Duffy 00:06:34 I love it. Danielle Boyer 00:06:35 Right? We saw Talking Elmo on the shelf at the store and we're like, if Elmo can talk, why can't he speak Indigenous languages? Right? Like it's not fair that our youth don't have toys like this to be able to learn from. It would be so exciting to see a Anishinaabe toy. So that was kind of like the spark. And so I got together with some of my students and we started like sketching designs and things like that. And ultimately it looks like kind of a little kitty cat. It's a little animal like droid. It sits on your shoulder and we have different woodland animal variants. That come from my homelands, like Makwa, which is bear. And so a little bear robot, we have a rabbit robot, things like that. And so basically, it's a cute, adorable little robot that the kids can talk back and forth with. Clare Duffy 00:07:26 And how does it work? Talk to me about if I'm a kid and I have gotten one of these, what does my interaction look like? Danielle Boyer 00:07:35 So basically what we do is we bring the robots into classrooms and the students build the robots themselves, which is really exciting. They get to design their own aspects of it, they get to wire the robot, and then from there how you interact with it is you speak to it, it recognizes your speech, it puts speech to text, it takes the text and it syncs it to an audio file. So if I say hello to it it's going to say hello, and then it's going to sync to the hello file, which in my language is Aaniin Boozhoo. So it's gonna say Aaniin Boozhoo back to me because I said hello to it. And it's go to say it in an audio file. So basically, it's not like a synthetic speech or anything like that. It's all prerecorded. And so, yeah, basically, you speak to it, it understands what you're saying, and replies in an audio file. Clare Duffy 00:08:24 Got it. So it is going to sort of say whatever you've said in Anishinaabemowin back to you. Danielle Boyer 00:08:31 Yeah, and it's also going to give context to pronunciation and how to say the word and meaning behind the word. Clare Duffy 00:08:37 Okay, interesting. Talk to me about the bigger vision here. Is it just to sort of help kids learn more vocabulary in this language? Danielle Boyer 00:08:48 The basic goal around it is for our youth to be able to introduce themselves first and foremost in our languages, because that's really important for your sense of belonging and things like that. The other component of it that I'm really passionate about is the documentation part of it. So making sure that my language is recorded and well documented, but in a way that's not being exploited by companies that are not from our communities cuz that happens a lot. Clare Duffy 00:09:18 Yeah. How did you go about that piece of it, collecting the recordings that would be used for the robot? Danielle Boyer 00:09:24 I started out with my grandma, actually. The first robot was in her voice, right? And it was so fun. But as we were kind of making the robots, and I say we as in my organization and team, we were like, it would be so much more relatable and inspiring to the students if we had it in children's voices. And so there were a few language keepers that I knew of, and their grandchildren were the ones who we first started recording with. Clare Duffy 00:09:52 So they taught their grandkids how to say the words and then the kids made the recordings. Danielle Boyer 00:09:57 Yes. Clare Duffy 00:09:58 Very cool. How many things can it say? Danielle Boyer 00:10:02 'Oh my goodness, I could say a lot of things. We've been recording so much so you can have like full-on conversations with the robot. The one thing that definitely limits us and sometimes I get comments of it's people want us to do like synthetic speech or like a robot voice. I was like, no, like languages are living things. It has to be handled with so much care. Like even language learning should never happen purely with a robot or on your phone. It should always happen with a community member. So this is just aiding to it and making something that helps inspire our youth and also helps inspire documentation. Clare Duffy 00:10:38 Danielle told me that SkoBot uses artificial intelligence, which is something she took great care to get right. We'll talk about that after the break. Clare Duffy 00:10:55 When Danielle was designing the SkoBot, she decided to use AI only for speech recognition. For example, when you say hello to SkoBots, it translates your speech into text, then syncs the text to the appropriate recorded audio response. Basically, the AI is purely functional. It's not generating or speaking the Indigenous language itself. And that was a very intentional choice. Danielle Boyer 00:11:24 'Yeah, so basically I took three years to develop an ethical AI framework, because we use AI within the robot, to say how should this happen and should it happen at all? And so basically we sat with community members, we sat youth and said, hey, when we're recording things, how should we go about this? Should we release things to the public? Should we have the synthetic speech? How involved should artificial intelligence be? Should we integrate different products like Duolingo? What does that look like? So we sat there and we talked about it and the ethics behind it because there have been non-Indigenous organizations that have gone to our communities, recorded language resources with us, and then copyrighted them and then tried to sell them back to Indigenous communities in North America. That is horrifying. That's a really scary thing. There's a lot of the times where companies, they see our information and our data is very valuable. And even I one time got sent a screenshot from Chat GPT of it speaking my language inaccurately. But I was like, oh, that's so scary. Like it has no regard for accuracy. When it comes to languages. Clare Duffy 00:12:45 Yeah, it sounds like, first of all, there are some people in Silicon Valley who could learn from your approach here, like the very thoughtful approach before further development of the technology. So what did you land on in terms of the pillars of that ethical framework and how you've decided to move forward? Danielle Boyer 00:13:03 Basically, what we landed on is that the people who record the language resources keep that. Our communities keep those resources. They're not for public consumption, they're not for sale, and I think it's important that if you're using a technology that could potentially be harmful, you need to keep it very localized and you need keep it moving slow, if that makes sense. Another thing is, is that we developed all of the software internally. So it's not a wrapper of another software that someone else developed. We made everything from scratch. So the voice recognition, everything like that, the text to speech, we made that. And so by making everything locally and keeping it locally run, we're able to have a lot of control over the impact of the software. We're able say, oh, we know the environmental impact of what's happening because we have it running personally off of our computers. And so, by doing that, it really helps us have data sovereignty. So basically having control and ownership over our own data and information. There is a lot of power in that. Clare Duffy 00:14:08 I mean, we've touched on this, but there is a lot of talk about using AI as a tool to preserve endangered languages, teaching the AI the language so that then it can learn as you interact with it, have conversation with people who are trying to learn the language. Talk to me about why that approach worries you. Danielle Boyer 00:14:28 So that approach worries me because of the corporations that own the software that people are training with our languages. When you give away that information to these companies, they can do whatever they want with it. And I've also seen a lot of the approach, especially when it comes to Indigenous languages, be very, without regard for accuracy. In my mind, this is a very similar thing to when companies have literally come into our communities and recorded with us, and then copyrighted things behind her back. What's the difference now with this? We're out here helping them be more accurate when we have no control over the outcome. And so we need to help train and develop more people in our communities who are in software and in technology so that we can develop our own solutions. Because as soon as it gets out of our hands, that's a very, very dangerous thing. Clare Duffy 00:15:23 Yeah, I was going to ask if you felt like there was a way that you'd like to see big tech get involved in this effort to preserve endangered languages, or if there's more that you wish they would do in this space. Do you see an opportunity for partnership, or would you rather it just be the communities themselves being the drivers of this? Danielle Boyer 00:15:45 So it depends on the company, it depends on the technology, I know that's a very general answer. But I'm going to give an example. With one of my students, we developed an augmented reality learning app. So basically, you can place plants in the environments around you and learn about the plants and their names and stuff like that. And we actually had a partner for that, and it was Snapchat, because they do really cool things with filters and things, right? And so they were a great partner because they let us do whatever we wanted, but they gave us the back end in the technology to be able to have the software to develop what we needed to develop. And so I think things like that is very useful. When companies let you do what you want to do and what is best for your community, but they give you the resources and the software to be able to create your own things. I think that that depends on the ethics of the company. But I also know that we can develop these things ourselves as long as we have the right skills. Clare Duffy 00:16:41 Yeah, it sounds like from what you're saying, like the key piece is, is the community involved? Is the community informed in terms of how exactly their data is going to be used? And do they have a choice about that? How do you hope to see language preservation technology evolve in the future? Danielle Boyer 00:17:00 Right now the technology's in the hands of people who are not Indigenous. I see a lot of people who say that they're data sovereignty experts and have even gone to school for it and speak on behalf of Indigenous communities, but they are not from North American Indigenous communities. And so I want to see that change. I want to see the space actually reflect our communities more accurately. I want see more representation for our language keepers. And I want to see less of a skew on academia and more on our community members and our elders who are out here doing the work. I think that that's so important that we have more of a balanced representation of who's actually in our spaces. And once that happens, I think tech and I think academia within language revitalization will start to look different. Clare Duffy 00:17:54 What does your grandmother think of the SkoBot project? Danielle Boyer 00:17:58 She thinks they're so adorable. I remember introducing them to her for the first time. I was like, yeah, it's here. I've been talking about it forever. Here it is. And we had the first iteration. They were cute. Later, I showed her ones that were actually done with the Anishinaabe woodland artists. So they have woodland floral faces and are inspired by animals and things. I then showed her those and she's like, finally, those look Anishinaabe. And so it was good to see the progression with her and for her to be as excited about it as I am. Clare Duffy 00:18:34 Talk to me about just her reaction to knowing so many more children are now going to be able to interact with the language. Danielle Boyer 00:18:42 I remember when I first introduced the robot. I was wearing the robot and I brought it to a powwow and I was like, how are kids gonna react to this? And I saw babies looking up at the robot, and I was like oh my goodness it's working! Like the children see it as a face or something to react to or a character that they can respond to and that to me was like there's potential here to actually do a lot of good with the robots. Clare Duffy 00:19:09 If people want to hear what endangered Indigenous languages sound like, maybe learn some words, how do you recommend they go about that? Danielle Boyer 00:19:18 Following people online is a really good start. So there's one hashtag I want to encourage people to look into. It's called Ojibwe Word of the Day. So my language is Anishinaabe, but it's also known as Ojibwe. And so you can learn exciting phrases and funny words. And I always encourage people start with that, whether it's actually your language or not. Like it's really cool to learn about. Clare Duffy 00:19:43 Nice, and if there are educators who are listening who say I'm really interested in trying to understand how I could use this technology in my classroom or something like that, is there a good way for people to learn about the work that you're doing? Danielle Boyer 00:19:58 Yeah, so people can learn more at And on there is more information about all of the robots I mentioned while we were chatting today, the affordable ones, language ones, things like that, and basically how to get science and tech into the classroom. So always check those things out. Clare Duffy 00:20:16 Thank you so much for talking to us. This was really interesting. Danielle Boyer 00:20:20 Thank you. So thank you in my language is Miigwech, so, "Miigwech." 00:20:26 Thanks again to Danielle Boyer. We'll link to the STEAM Connections website in the show notes so that you can see the SkoBot for yourself. That's it for this week's episode of Terms of Service. I'm Clare Duffy, catch you next week.
