More than 13 years after an earthquake-turned-tsunami triggered the second-largest nuclear accident in global history, a robot has snagged a piece of melted fuel from the fatally radioactive Fukushima reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) has extracted the first sample of nuclear fuel debris from the containment vessel

Small sample to aid in planning the safe decommissioning of the nuclear plant, which contains an estimated 880 tons of highly radioactive molten fuel

A robot has recovered a highly radioactive sample from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. This was preceded by a number of mishaps.

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex said Saturday it moved a tiny portion of melted fuel just outside a reactor container as part of its attempt to retrieve the debris for the first time since a nuclear disaster hit the plant over a decade ago.

Tepco retrieved a device holding a small amount of fallen debris from the containment vessel of the plant's No. 2 reactor as part of experimental removal work.

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The mission is not over until the sample's radioactivity is below a set standard and safely placed into a container

Around 800 tonnes of fatally radioactive molten fuel remains in the plants, and the mission is a step in a long-term clean-up operation A remote-controlled robot has safely returned with a tiny piece of melted fuel it collected from inside one of three damaged reactors at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for the first time