Tepco is so chastised by previous accusations of secrecy — or so overwhelmed and numbed by bad news — that it does not even try to hide the severity of challenges it is grappling with. Three power failures in the past five weeks have been enough, though, to convince everyone else that the situation is grave; one can only imagine the sentiments of the local residents and plant workers. By Tepco’s own estimates, confirmed by the I.A.E.A., the hoped-for decommissioning of Daiichi remains up to 40 years away — a long time to count on the benignity of nature.

If rats and radioactive leaks were not enough of a reminder of the dangerous state of the nuclear cleanup efforts, there has been a spate of earthquakes recently. Seismic activity in a country that experiences at least 10 percent of all the earthquakes in the world is of course not news, but so many strong jolts can hardly be reassuring.

Still, there is also good news on the energy front. The feed-in tariff system, jump-started by the government last July to make solar energy more competitive, has succeeded beyond expectation. Investments in solar, wind and geothermal are all on the rise.

Marubeni, one of Japan’s largest trading houses, recently announced that it would bring significant investment to geothermal, an abundant source in a land of volcanoes and thousands of hot springs. In March, deep-sea drilling off the coast of Aichi Prefecture confirmed major reserves of shale gas.

The government still maintains that Japan’s nuclear power plants, which were closed or had their operations suspended following the 2011 disaster, will be restarted, though only if new safety standards are met. Those standards, just made public by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, will go into effect in July, and may be so stringent that almost none of the nuclear plants will meet the requirements for a restart.

In the words of David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist and geneticist on the board of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation, a private sector initiative, an all-out push for renewable energy seems hardly more complicated than restarting nuclear reactors.

Necessity being the mother of invention, if this many gains could be made in the renewable sector, despite tremendous political uncertainty and the poor economy, how much more if the technology-savvy nation were to rally in that same direction? Conservation measures have thus far worked quite well, and people are willing to do more.