From ocean waves to electricity: clean power for our planet

When Inna Braverman was two weeks old, the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded. It was 1986 and the Braverman family was living just outside Kiev, well within the fallout range from the Chernobyl disaster. As baby Inna breathed in air tinged with radioactive dust, she stopped breathing. “I went into full respiratory arrest,” Braverman explains in an emotional interview with ISRAEL21c. Braverman’s mother approached her daughter’s crib and began screaming. But she was also a nurse. After a few long seconds of paralysis, she administered CPR to the tiny infant. It saved her life. Four years later, the Braverman family left the former USSR for Israel. Inna was still very sick. “I’d get blue marks on my body, as if I’d been hit.” But the effects of radiation poisoning eventually dissipated and Braverman grew up healthy in the Holy Land.

Chernobyl influenced Braverman’s life in another way – and that influence has the chance to dramatically influence the world for the better. “I got a second chance,” she says. “And I grew up knowing that I must do something different, something big with my life. If Chernobyl was all about producing energy in an unsafe way, I wondered whether there was a cleaner way to harness electricity.

Wave energy

Twenty years later, fresh out of the University of Haifa, Braverman realized the answer. There were plenty of companies working with solar, wind and hydro-electric power generation. But none had succeeded in trying to use one highly prevalent renewable source of energy–the ocean’s waves.-- More...