Five years after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the urgency to go green in Japan has faded.

The drive toward ambitious targets for the use of renewable fuels has been slowed by resistance from utilities and concerns about the costs of renewable-energy projects at a time of cheap fossil-fuel imports, as well as the projects’ safety and environmental impact.

A case in point: Proponents of building a geothermal plant in the district where the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown occurred in 2011 ran into a wall of community opposition.

“This is just like when you brought us nuclear power, and it scares me,” Yutaka Kanno, president of the Hotel Hananoyu in Fukushima prefecture, said, according to minutes of a meeting with government officials and developers in 2012. “Prove that geothermal is safe. Then we can talk about exploratory drilling.”

Many reassurances later, developers plan to dig the first exploratory well this fall for a possible geothermal plant near Mount Bandai in Fukushima, about 130 miles north of Tokyo. Even if the results are promising, it would take about 10 years for a plant to start operating on the site.

Before the Fukushima accident, resource-poor Japan depended on nuclear plants for about 30% of its power.

Now, with nearly all of the 50-odd nuclear plants in the country still shut down in the wake of the accident, the country gets 1% of its energy from nuclear power. Cheap coal and natural gas, nearly all imported, have filled the void, together comprising more than 75% of Japan’s energy needs in the year ended in March, compared with 54% before the accident.

Fierce opposition to reopening nuclear plants and growing reliance on foreign energy sources would suggest a huge opening for renewables. Yet renewables made up just 14% of energy production in the year ended in March, up from 10% before Fukushima. That has advocates worried that the government’s goal of having renewables provide 22% to 24% of Japan’s energy needs by 2030 is slipping out of reach.

“Whether or not Japan embraces nuclear again, we need to reduce the role of petroleum-based fuels, and to do so, we need far more renewables than we’re on track to achieve,” says Shinichi Suzuki, secretary-general of the Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association.

The challenges renewables face are daunting. Regulatory hurdles and “not in my backyard” opposition hinder investment in wind and geothermal power, while a pullback in government-mandated prices for the purchase of solar power by utilities is hurting the growth of that sector.

Decades of development have built up Japan’s hydroelectric-power capacity, but there are few potential sites left for large-scale plants. Biomass plants struggle with low efficiency in transforming fuel into power. Sea wave and tidal power, which would seem like a natural energy source for the island nation, has been held back by the projected price tag and concerns about potential environmental damage.

Meanwhile, deregulation of the power market has driven utilities to seek low-cost fuels as they fight for customers in a country where electricity demand is projected to stay flat through 2020. Japanese companies now plan to increase the number of coal-burning power stations in the country by almost 50% in the next 12 years, even as the U.S. and Europe shun the emissions-heavy fuel.

Most of the growth in renewables has been in solar, but the industry is suffering. Solar farms and rooftop panels spread throughout Japan starting in 2012. That’s when the government began requiring utilities to pay a higher price for solar power than they charge consumers for electricity. That bolstered the companies that generate solar power and made solar more attractive for consumers, who can sell unused electricity generated by their panels to their utility.

But utilities quickly complained about the costs of protecting the power grid from imbalances in supply and demand caused by the variability of solar power. The government soon lowered the price the utilities have to pay for solar power, and the results have been jarring.

Bankruptcies in companies that generate solar power are on track to hit a record this year, totaling 31 in the first six months, up 24% from the first half of last year, according to Tokyo Shoko Research. And consumers are installing fewer panels on their homes. The generating capacity of solar panels sold in Japan in the year through March was down almost 25% from the previous year, the Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association says. Panasonic Corp. ’s latest quarterly profit in its business segment comprising solar panels was half of what it was in the year-earlier quarter.

Geothermal is one hopeful area. It can supply a steady flow of power, unlike solar. And Japan is home to the world’s third-largest geothermal reserves, of which only 2.2% is harnessed.

But geothermal power has been held back due to limited access to national parks, where many of the promising locations for large-scale drilling are, as well as high initial costs and concerns about naturally occurring heavy metals like arsenic being released in the production process and seeping into groundwater.

Now, the government is offering financial support for exploratory drilling and opening up more land in national parks for surveys. Those changes have set in motion 14 new large-scale projects. But it’s too soon to know how many of those, if any, will result in power plants or whether the country will be able to reach the government’s target of roughly tripling Japan’s geothermal generating capacity by 2030.

Whether renewables can overcome all these challenges or not, some analysts say nuclear power can’t remain a pariah in Japan.

Even with huge investments and a strong commitment to renewables, a return to heavy reliance on nuclear power is the best way to ensure Japan’s energy security for the near future, says Nobuo Tanaka, former executive director of the International Energy Agency and president of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, because it would reduce the country’s reliance on fossil-fuel imports while renewable power sources are being developed.

“Expanding renewables is important, but it needs to be twinned with a nuclear-power solution that is acceptable to the public,” he says.