What will we fill up in the future?

Especially in times when fuel prices are going through the roof, the public discourse goes back and forth between “nothing more” because we only charge our electric cars and “stillliquid”, regardless of whether it is fossil fuels or designed fuels or liquid hydrogen.

Interestingly, the production of the new fuels discussed depends very much on the availability of regeneratively generated electrical energy.

In the future, hydrogen would be used to generate electricity from hydrogen in the fuel cell car, while electricity would be made from hydrogen for the battery-electric e-car in the power plant, which would then be made available there by charging the batteries housed in the car.

Recently, the silver lining has appeared on the horizon, which would allow everyone, even the wildest drive dreams, to come true. That seems unbelievable, but now, after more than 30 years of research, waiting and hoping, a researcher's dream is within reach: it is nuclear fusion.

Once again, the roots of this technology are in Germany, more precisely in Garching near Munich in the 1970s. Spiritus Rector was the fusion researcher Klaus Pinkau at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, whose technical achievement will hopefully not be forgotten after he passed away last month.

And for many years the estimated large-scale production use had always been dated 30 years ahead. But what is different now, that one can have legitimate hope that the Rolling Start Date is a thing of the past and that we can expect industrial use in the foreseeable future?

What is different is above all that the American tech companies are getting involved and 30 start-ups have now started to make the strictly process-controlled nuclear fusion manageable.

It is quite unusual for a German company to stand in line for the big bucks. And you

obviously need that, because Marvel Fusion, the Bavarian start-up estimates the cost of a test stand at € 350 million.

Of course, it should not be forgotten to work on the technology impact assessment at the same time as the development of the technology.

According to what is known today, the process is much safer than the fission because it is self-extinguishing when the excitation energy is switched off and there is a much smaller amount of radioactive waste than with the fission.

Now the Munich area would be an ideal successor zone for nuclear fusion research, which originally came from the Garching fusion reactor.

And now, irony of fate, concerns are coming to light from Munich of all places, namely from the green politician Anton Hofreiter. It remains to be seen whether Marvel will get any money after Hofreiter's announcement.

Bets can be placed on the fact that Tesla or the tech companies will secure "the trophy" with their own start-ups before the Germans, despite their 30-year technological lead, before the German start-up gets up and running.

Once more a technology would have been discovered, invented, developed in advance and was a technology leader for a long time, only to lose the weather when the product is nearing market maturity.

But whoever wins the race, if nuclear fusion technology catches on, suddenly all the things in the new mobility make sense that were previously very expensive because they are all based on green electricity, which will also be a scarce commodity for the foreseeable future.