On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site.

The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.