By Laura Anthony
 
November 11, 2008
 
LIVERMORE, Ca. -- It's a process called LIFE, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger claims it could be the clean solution to this country's massive energy needs.
 
"This fusion energy that we're talking about here, which creates no greenhouse gases whatsoever, but provides so much energy. I cannot wait for this to become a reality," says Schwarzenegger.
 
LIFE stands for Laser Inertial Confinement Fusion-fission Energy. It uses the 192 lasers inside the nearly-completed National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. When bombarded with lasers, a ball of frozen hydrogen gas as small as a pencil eraser would ignite and release incredible amounts of clean-burning energy.
 
"A thousand times more power than lighting up the whole United States," says Schwarzenegger.
 
It's the same type of energy emitted from the sun and stars in the solar system. Once this facility is completed in March of next year, scientists at the lab are hopeful that they'll achieve fusion ignition, within 18 months.
 
That is, if it works. So far, no experiments have actually been performed here. The facility's completion is about six years late, and more than a billion dollars over budget, now topping 3.5 billion dollars. And, Congress has cut funding to the project twice. Still, Miller is confident this work will succeed.
 
"I think we will get ignition. I think we will get ignition shortly after we turn the facility on, but it is science. It is technology and it's not done, till it's done," says Lab Director George Miller.
 
If the process works, scientists hope to build a LIFE pilot power plant around 2020, with commercial deployment by the year 2030.