Nuclear Power Station Goes Online along India's Tsunami-prone Coast

A controversial nuclear power plant on the tsunami-prone coast of southern India went online Tuesday and is supplying power to the region's electrical grid, officials said.

It took six years and numerous delays before the $2.4 billion Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant was able to go online. The plant lies along the coast in the state of Tamil Nadu in the far south of the Indian subcontinent.

Protestors opposed to nuclear power and with safety concerns have rallied around the plant at numerous times throughout its construction.

Tuesday the plant went live for two hours at a capacity of 175 megawatts, Bloomberg news reported, adding that by the end of the week the unit should run at half-capacity and that in six week's time, the reactor should be running at full capacity of 1,000 megawatts.

A second unit at the nuclear campus is expected to go online within a year, Bloomberg said, citing station director Hari Narayan Sahu.

The nuclear reactor sits on the the same stretch of coast that was hit hard by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed an estimated 18,045 people in India.

In the wake of the March 2011 tsunami that triggered the nuclear incident in Fukushima, Japan, protests against the Kudankulam facility have increased. The Fukushima incident was the worst civil nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Bloomberg news reports that the first two units at Kudankulam are not covered under any liability law and that "concerns over the extent of liability equipment suppliers will have to bear in case of an accident is stalling India's deals with Areva SA (AREVA), General Electric Co. and Westinghouse Electric Co., impeding Prime MinisterManmohan Singh's goal to boost the nation's nuclear generation capacity 13 times by 2032."

However officials in India say the benefits of nuclear power cannot be ignored.

"If we are able to spread out the capital cost over a long period, we can get extremely competitive power tariffs from nuclear plants," said Debasish Mishra, head of energy practice at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. in Mumbai.

According to the Wall Street Journal, India plans to increase its nuclear power capacity from its current 4,700 megawatts to 63,000 megawatts in the next 20 years.