India is determined to promote its nuclear energy program with a planned 20 more nuclear reactors in the pipeline amid escalating protests in the country.

On Monday, the www.indrus.in, quoting the Times of India, reported India is poised to launch in the next eight weeks the Kudankulam nuclear power station, located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a project made in cooperation with Russia.

The planned 20 nuclear reactors, according to Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), will be built in different states in the country. The NPCIL have already came up with a list of chosen sites for the plan, among them at at Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh, as well as a list of back-up sites in case the government faces resistance from the priority locations, Dr S.K. Jain, chairman and managing director of NPCIL, said in the Deccan Chronicle.

Dr Jain said the additional reactors would be constructed and made online during the 12th Five-Year Plan period.

Forty per cent of India's population still has to experience having sufficient and a steady access to electricity, that's why the government is resolute to jack up the country's nuclear power generation by five times in the next eight years. India currently has six nuclear power plants with 20 reactors generating a total of 4,780 megawatts, OilPrice.com said. Seven other reactors, expected to give an additional 5,300 megawatts, are still under construction, it added.

"India plans to have a total installed nuclear capacity of 63,000 megawatts by the year 2032, using both indigenous technology and imported reactors. Nuclear technology has several distinct advantages - it is compact and highly manageable in terms of handling, transportation and storage of the fuel. Thermal technologies have the problems of greenhouse gas emissions, fly-ash and handling, transportation, storage problems of large quantities of fuel as well as availability of coal," Sushilkumar Shinde, India's Power Minister, said on Feb. 22.

The first reactor of the $2.6 billion Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu should have been online last December, but the Russian and Indian scientists behind the project decided to stall the project amid concerns by the local residents protested over environmental, livelihood and safety concerns.

The Kudankulam nuclear plant is expected to give off a combined 1,000-megawatt power.

"Time has come to think of new processes and of tackling new challenges. I am not saying that the present systems are not safe. There is a necessity now to do this in the country to restore the confidence of people in the safety of the technology," Srikumar Banerjee, chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, as well as secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, said on Monday.