Japan’s nuclear power plant crisis no longer is garnering the large headlines it received in the days immediately following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 13,800 people, with 14,000 others still listed as missing.

However, now, nearly six weeks after the quake and tsunami inflicted what is being estimated at $300 billion in damage — not counting the power plant damage and the plant cleanup costs still forthcoming — news from the crippled power facility remains no more encouraging than it was a month ago.

In fact, in the aftermath of two robots’ deployment inside the plant on Sunday, the news can be regarded as even more worrisome than when it was first estimated that the plant crisis might last until the end of the year.

With the robots having detected radiation levels much too high for workers to re-enter, and with no certainty as to when that situation might change for the better, officials face the difficult, complicated task of revising strategies on which they had been basing their hopes, if that timetable is to remain realistic.

Judging from Sunday’s finding, an official of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator, would now have to be “creative” if it is to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown within six to nine months — a goal that the company disclosed on Sunday.

Nuclear power’s greatest scientific minds thus have been handed an enormous task that will test their knowledge and expertise. The long-term good that might emanate from that challenge will be a deeper understanding of how to react to any future nuclear plant problems or, better yet, how to prevent them through improved design and operations.

Japan could have employed more safety features at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant than were built into it, but designers never envisioned an event as catastrophic as the one-two punch that occurred on March 11.

Japan’s disclosure on Sunday that there is not yet an end in sight for the plant’s crisis — and possibly that there is less cause for optimism than existed previously — has set the stage for months of uncertainty and fear over what lies ahead — especially, how that might impact people far from Japan’s shores.

Albeit on a larger scale, Japan’s crisis is a revival of the kind of concern and uncertainty that existed in this country after BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil disaster on April 20, 2010, that took three months to get under control.

BP and the world learned much from the efforts involved in ending the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. So too will the world — and, most importantly, the nuclear experts — gain much knowledge and understanding from the efforts leading to the resolution of the current crisis in Japan.

The banner headlines regarding Japan’s ongoing challenge are now less frequent, but Japan’s continuing plight must remain everyone’s concern.

What Japan currently is facing is a humbling reminder that the world, in regard to nuclear power generation, has not really come as far as many people might have led themselves to believe.

Japan’s current nuclear heartache has proven that there is more for industry experts to understand — and that might be true in this country as well.