Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) had on Wednesday released a roadmap schedule that will aid the dismantling of the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in the next 30 to 40 years.

As per the timetable, within two years, Tepco takes out the spent fuel rods at Fukushima Dai-Ichi. Its engineers will then attempt to slowly haul out melted fuel from one of the reactors within a decade, the Japanese government said, as reported by Bloomberg News.

Earlier in October, the Japanese government estimated decommissioning the station may cost at least $14.8 billion.

Government had placed robots to gather information on the extent of the damage deep inside the reactors, including the level of devastation, the amount of the meltdown, how much material needs to be removed and exact radiation levels inside.

On Dec. 16, the Japanese government said Tepco had brought the station into a cold shutdown, still included in its timeline of stabilisation efforts on the reactors before moving on to the next phase of work.

Experts believed Tepco is just waiting for radiation levels to fall before attempting to extract the melted fuel so as not to cause further damage between the present state of the reactor and on the lives of workers who will do the risky job.

"It's a balance between the dose they're going to get to workers doing this job and the need to remove the fuel from the reactor," Tony Irwin, a lecturer on nuclear technology at the Australian National University, told Bloomberg News.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan not only caused damage to lives and property, but also resulted in the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. It wrecked three reactors of Fukushima nuclear plant. Some 160,000 people fled the area around the Fukushima station, located about 220 kilometers (137 miles) north of Tokyo, for fear of radiation.

But the problem did not end there. Demolishing it is more complex than Chernobyl because of the more nuclear fuel involved.

According to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, the Fukushima nuclear plant has more than 2,700 spent fuel assemblies in four buildings. Majority are located in the fourth unit, which fortunately did not melt down since an earlier maintenance check had made the fuel removed from the reactor. This occurred before the quake and tsunami struck.

Once Tepco gets to take out the spent rods, it will then extract the melted cores, which had dropped to the bottom of the reactor vessels then burnt through inner steel casings into concrete foundations. Reactor No. 1 had 400 fuel assemblies while reactors 2 and 3 each had 548, the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum reported.

Each assembly contains 60 uranium rods about 4.35 meters (14 feet) long. This could translate to about 270 metric tons of fuel needed to be removed.

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