Tepco Finally Gets an Official Cleanup Plan

The fact is that until Aug. 14, 2013 — two years, five months and three days after the natural disasters that set off Japan’s worst nuclear accident — all the work that was going on at the accident site to tame and cool the reactors as well as control contamination was, officially, ad hoc.
No longer: bureaucracy has finally set in.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Japan’s nuclear regulator, officially approved an plan that lays out — in 3,695 detailed pages — everything from the broad road map that Fukushima Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. is following to clean up and dismantle the crippled plant, to the procedures it’ll follow, the equipment it’ll use and checks needed to ensure everything goes safely.

Of course, there are still lots of unknowns and unknowable's about the cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi — where exactly the melted fuel rods are, for instance, and how to get them out safely.(That the big if, isn't it?)

experts expect the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup could take as long as 40 years.
(By that time most of us will be dead.)
[link to blogs.wsj.com]