Experts have said it will take years -- perhaps decades -- to fully clean up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Hydrogen explosions blew apart the No. 1 and No. 3 reactor housings, while another hydrogen blast is suspected to have damaged the No. 2 reactor. Fires believed caused by heat from the No. 4 spent fuel pool damaged that unit's reactor building.
The atomic energy commission's report noted it took 10 years to remove nuclear fuel after the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in the United States. The commission predicted removing fuel at Fukushima would require more time, because the extent of the damage was more severe.
But the timetable doesn't address plans for dealing with the radiation released into the wider environment from the Fukushima disaster, said Timothy Mousseau, a radiation ecologist at the University of South Carolina.
Mousseau told CNN International's "Prism" on Wednesday that scientists "are just now starting to get a handle" on the amount of radioactive material released by the disaster.
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