But this is just the beginning of a massive remediation effort at the site, which experts say could take many decades to complete due to the catastrophic destruction caused by the massive earthquake and storm surge.

After many months of planning, workers have begun carefully removing each of the 1,533 fuel assemblies still sitting in the damaged cooling pool at Reactor 4 nearly three years after the disaster. Each of the assemblies measure roughly four meters in length, according to reports, and individually contain as many as 80 separate fuel rods, which means that there could be as many as 122,000 spent fuel rods in total that need to be vacated from the reactor.