Having previously planned to phase out all of Germany’s nuclear power plants by the 2020’s, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been forced to admit that Germany needs nuclear power.

The planned closing down of the nuclear power plants clashes with Germany’s targets for climate change. Indeed, a government commissioned study showed that Merkel’s targets for CO2 emissions were unfeasible without nuclear power.

The green party is a strong force in Germany, but it looks like the German government has been forced to choose between combating global warming and shutting down nuclear power plants. They have chosen to battle climate change, which Merkel is passionate about, and so need nuclear power in order to do so.

Mrs Merkel set the target of a 20 per cent reduction of CO2 emissions within the EU by 2020 when she had the presidency recently. For Germany, she has set a 40 per cent target, but this study shows that Germany needs to keep nuclear power to meet these goals.

They have not realised it yet, but it is likely that Germany and other developed countries will not only need to maintain their fleet of nuclear plant, but will also need to expand it and build more plants, if they want to seriously have an impact on climate change and reliance on fossil fuels. The UK and some other countries have already expressed plans to build more reactors, such as the 4 reactors the UK government announced recently. A recent study showed that the world needs 3000 nuclear plants to seriously effect global warming, so the last move governments want to make is abandoning nuclear energy.