An angry group of people who are determined to oppose the Indian government’s plan to construct a nuclear power plant in the western part of India set a couple buses on fire and ransacked a hospital.

The people of Jaitapur have been fighting against the proposal since the government announced their plans of building the power plant nearly four years ago. Their group did not attract many supporters until the recent nuclear plant disaster in Japan following a massive earthquake and a deadly tsunami.

The general strike on Tuesday was called because police officers threatened to disperse protestors after attacking a police station, leaving one person dead. The streets were mostly deserted Tuesday; but at around noon, groups of people gathered in the streets shouting slogans and chants against the Indian government.

The police report said that the mob ransacked a government hospital and burned down three buses used for public transportation. There were no reports of death or injury due to the incident.

Construction of the first unit of the nuclear plant is supposed to start later this year with a proposed budget of $10 billion. If all goes as planned, this plant will become the biggest in the world. Areva, a French nuclear energy that started this project, is expected to generate 9,900 megawatts of electrical power. The first out of six units is projected to begin producing power by 2018.

Jairam Ramesh, Environment Minister, said that what happened in Japan is devastating but it should serve as a wake-up call for everyone to increase security and strengthen contingency plans. However, he insisted that it should not stop India from pursuing cleaner energy source.

The radiation levels in the air outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continue to fall. The world nuclear agency said on its website that radiation levels continue to decrease. However, people are still concerned as radiation levels remain high in waters in two different locations.

A representative of the company operating the nuclear plant – Tokyo Electric Power Company – said that water samples from reactors 1 and 2 showed high levels of radiation. What is even more disturbing is that radiation levels from water samples of reactor 3 are twice as high. Some analysts say that the radiation levels in reactor number 3 suggest a possible leakage from the reactor’s core.

Work around reactor number 3 has been stopped after some men have accidentally stepped on contaminated water. Those men were exposed to around 175 millisieverts of radiation. Just to give you an idea of how high this is, people who work in highly industrialized areas generally receive 3 millisieverts of radiation every year. After having been admitted for four days in a hospital in Chiba, the men simply had injuries that can be akin to really bad sun damage.

Experts have over and over said that reactor number 3 is their main concern because among all reactors, it is the only one that has used uranium and plutonium fuel which is more dangerous than pure uranium fuel.

Nishiyama accepted that they had a difficult time controlling the pressure and temperature within the reactors. However, they have declared reactor number 1 to be stable Friday.