JAPAN: A robot begins removal of melted fuel from the Fukushima nuclear plant. It could take a century.

A long robot entered a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant on Tuesday, beginning a two-week, high-stakes mission to retrieve for the first time a tiny amount of melted fuel debris from the bottom.

The robot’s trip into the Unit 2 reactor is a crucial initial step for what comes next — a daunting, decades-long process to decommission the plant and deal with large amounts of highly radioactive melted fuel inside three reactors that were damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Specialists hope the robot will help them learn more about the status of the cores and the fuel debris.

Here is an explanation of how the robot works, its mission, significance and what lies ahead as the most challenging phase of the reactor cleanup begins.

Nuclear fuel in the reactor cores melted after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s cooling systems to fail. The melted fuel dripped down from the cores and mixed with internal reactor materials such as zirconium, stainless steel, electrical cables, broken grates and concrete around the supporting structure and at the bottom of the primary containment vessels.

The reactor meltdowns caused the highly radioactive, lava-like material to spatter in all directions, greatly complicating the cleanup.

Well, that’s exactly what robots are for. On the other hand, this being Japan, you have to wonder about the chances of a giant mutated robot flattening Tokyo.