Tokyo Electric Power Company on Tuesday (November 26) began removing the second batch of spent fuel rods from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in a decommissioning process said to take at least a full year.<br/> <br />This comes less than one week after Tepco, as it is also known, completed the removal of the first fuel rods from a cooling pool high up in a badly damaged reactor building, a rare success in the often fraught battle to control the site.<br/> <br />The batches of 22 unused fuel assemblies, which each contain 50-70 of the fuel rods, are to be transferred by a trailer to a safer storage pool after each operation round which lasts four days, Tepco has said.<br/> <br />Its technicians must pluck more than 1,500 brittle and potentially damaged assemblies from the unstable reactor No.4., the early stages of a decommissioning process following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the site.<br/> <br />The hazardous removal operation has been likened by Arnie Gundersen, a veter
