A majority of the German public are in favour of the continued operation of the country's three remaining nuclear power reactors beyond the end of this year, the results of two opinion polls show. There is significant support for keeping the units running for up to another five years and even to construct new reactors in order to secure energy supplies.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that keeping the country's final three operating nuclear power reactors online beyond their planned shutdown at the end of this year may "make sense" in order to ensure electricity supplies.

Germany's federal radioactive waste company, Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung, has awarded Hanover-based construction firm Ed Züblin AG a contract to construct the radioactive waste reloading hall at the Konrad repository in Salzgitter, Lower Saxony.

The leaders of the Group of Seven large industrialised nations should incentivise the extension of the operating life of existing nuclear reactors and support the restart of others to help achieve the goal of achieving a low-carbon and secure energy supply, the nuclear industry has said.

A new method to extract molybdenum-99 from low-enriched uranium targets, developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich, could significantly reduce the radioactive waste produced during the production of the isotope. Mo-99 is the precursor for medical radioisotope technetium-99m, used in more than 85% of all nuclear medicine diagnostic examinations.

Germany's Uniper Anlagenservice GmbH has become the first company to complete the dismantling, segmentation and packaging of two reactor pressure vessels in parallel within one year. In December 2021, the company successfully completed the dismantling of the vessels of both Sweden's Barsebäck unit 1 and Germany's Neckarwestheim I.

Germany's Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal has awarded a contract for planning the design and licensing of a waste treatment plant and an interim storage facility at the former Asse II salt mine in the district of Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony. The winning consortium has until the end of 2023 to submit the plans.

The Brokdorf, Grohnde and Gundremmingen C nuclear power plants were permanently shut down on 31 December in compliance with Germany's nuclear phase-out policy. The move leaves three reactors in operation, which are scheduled to be taken offline by the end of this year.

German utility RWE has awarded a contract to Westinghouse to dismantle two reactors at the Gundremmingen nuclear facility. It has also contracted a consortium comprising Framatome and Transnubel to dismantle the reactor of the Emsland plant.

Separate domestic and international initiatives to support the development and production of medical radioisotopes have been announced in Canada, Germany, Japan and the USA. These include a federal award of USD35 million to support the commercial production of molybdenum-99 in the USA; a new linear accelerator-based technique for production of actinium-225 in Japan; and a Canadian-German collaboration to explore the production of Ac-225.

Russia has set a target of 2060 to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions, President Vladimir Putin has told Russian Energy Week 2021. Counting nuclear exports as contributing towards global decarbonisation and saying Germany's phase out "does not make any sense", he said that he thinks energy system decisions should be made by experts.

Germany's phase-out of nuclear energy will only lead to the country missing its 2030 carbon emissions target, 25 leading foreign and German environmentalists, journalists and academics have written in an open letter to the German public. They call on German politicians to be "brave enough" to change legislation to at least postpone the shutdown of the country's reactors.