These entrepreneurs are looking forward to typhoon season

Challenergy founder and CEO Atsushi Shimizu.

“My parents couldn’t buy toys for me,” confesses Atsushi Shimizu.

As a rambunctious elementary school student, Atsushi ran around the mountains with self-made bows and arrows.

“My friend had a toy airplane that his parents bought for him. I made one so we could play together.”

The engineer is a natural tinkerer. As a child he dissected watches and even tried to build a magnet propelled linear motor car for his science project.

Everything changed for him on March 11, 2011.

Wall of water

“I thought we needed nuclear energy,” reflects Atsushi. “It was clean and got rid of CO2, but Fukushima completely flipped my world.”

The March 11 earthquake and resulting tsunami took out the nuclear reactors’ emergency systems and led to a complete meltdown in Fukushima. Photo credit: Wikimedia.

On March 11, 2011, Japan’s largest earthquake in recorded history shifted the entire main island 2.4 meters east. Far from the epicenter, Atsushi kept working.

“We couldn’t use internet at work, so I didn’t know until I went home. I watched it all weekend and saw what was happening in Fukushima. It was like Chernobyl.”

“I thought that if this could happen in Japan, it could happen anywhere. We can’t just leave this problem to the next generation and use as much energy as we want.”

Icon credit: The Noun Project.

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Looking forward to typhoons