The infrastructure needed to extract the rods has been damaged.

The rods need to be kept within the coolant water AT ALL TIMES. The zirconium reacts with oxygen (air) by catching fire!!

The rods are extremely hot and very very very radioactive. The coolant water also acts as a shield.

There isnt anywhere to put them if you did extract them.

These little facts are the reason among many why they havent pulled any out yet. I didnt know it, but read recently that the common fuel pool is only 50 meters away.
And it contains over 6000 rods. The scenario is scary. It wont take much for the sfp to collapse. Even last year they were saying that concrete was "dropping" down from the pool.
If it does collapse, the result would be an enormous horrible mess of melted fuel, bubbling away exposed to the air, buried under rubble. And hot hot hot!!!

The scenario is actually too scary to think of. The next problem of course would be the simply enormous radiation output, that would instsantly completly leave no choice but to abandon the site. Fullstop. Then the flowon effect would take out close by reactors in the area, (I think there are three FACILITIES nearby) which would become as part of fukushima in meltdowns etc...in other words, the collapse of sfp 4 would initiate the end of Japan in a very real sense.

And we have known about this problem for a while now, I have been telling everyone, but no one wants to listen, aparently its all "doom and gloom" They are all talking about it as if it just happened? Im personally over it all myself, now I just dont care, the world has really gone mad, and I have "given up" I just want to play skyrim and pretend to live in my own world, smoking bush tomatoes helps too, goodbye cruel world...its over.....