I know the new sarcophagus has robotic cranes so they can begin to dismantle the old sarcophagus, at least, and presumably, then presumably start to dismantle the rest of the facility.

The elephant's foot presents an intriguing problem not only because of how deep it is in the facility, but that it's essentially a super-dense, super-concentrated glob of radioactive junk that is essentially fused to the structure of the reactor. And of course, kills anyone who gets close to it.

One article I read, of course, suggested that when it comes to cleaning up radioactive waste, the longer you wait, the easier it is. Which is true, what was done recently would've been drastically more dangerous a couple decades ago. It gets safer to work in the area the longer you wait.

So as long as we can be relatively confident it will hold containment in the facility, it may be best left alone.

I think I heard that the long term plan is to remove all material from the reactor. But I don't when and most importantly, I don't think anyone has a clue on how to remove the material from the reactor.

I guess it's probably "wait for more advanced robots to be developed"

I think the Japanese are working on those because they need them for cleaning up Fukushima.

I remember reading in some forums a while ago that the timeframe is somewhat in the range of 50-100y for recovering most of the waste. Probably they need another sarcophag inbetween ...

This one is designed to last a century, so they do have some time.

Part of the problem is that if they don't do it in time, this sarcophagus is mostly impossible to repair because of all the radioactivity, so they'd need to encase it in a third, even huger one.