Why can’t we convert water from rivers into steam to prevent floods? Putting the water in the air for plants/trees as a solution for flooding?
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How will you heat the River enough to do that without damaging wildlife?
it wold be extremely expensive to boil enough water to have an effect, especially in the high humidity accompanying storms.
the solution of flood plains is the only cost effective and environmentally responsible solution
The amount of energy you need to do that is enormous. It is no way a somting fesable to do
Flooding are in a condition where you get lost more than usual water from rains, melting snow etc. Even if turning it to steam was no a problem from an energy perspective you still need dams and other ways to divert the water to the steam generation device. So it would require lot of inforastuctiore
Evaporated water will just fall back to the earth as rain, not to mention the absurd amounts of energy required to convert water from its liquid to gaseous form… think how long a pot can boil for before all the water evaporates
Heating water into steam takes energy, a lot of it. Like how a pot of water takes a while on the stove to boil, even though the stove top is putting out a lot of heat.
Trying to evaporate a running river would take an incredible amount of heat, and to make that heat would take and incredible amount of energy. It would be like trying to keep a pot of water boiling while constantly adding cold water to it.
So, while you technically could evaporate water out of a river to bring it down from flood stage, it would take too much energy.
Everyone has pointed out how impossible it would be to do, but let’s just say you could for arguments sake.
Water vapor is responsible for roughly 70% of the greenhouse effect, the #1 greenhouse gas. Are you sure you want to ramp that up?
Let’s assume you have a reasonably sized city flooded with a metre of water.
That gives about 129000000000 Litres of water.
A conservative estimate of the energy to boil that much water is 4.32E16 Joules.
That’s more energy than 2000 nuclear bombs all detonated at the same time.
As you can probably guess, it’s not super feasible to blow up 2000 nuclear bombs every time a city gets flooded, so we can’t really do what you’re suggesting.
More intense floods are already caused by humans. The areas that are prone to flooding are often wetlands already and wetlands are adapted to mitigate the effects of floods. When we develop on wetlands, we remove permeable ground and replace it with impermeable roads, parking lots, buildings, and sidewalks. Water runs right off these areas and the remaining wetlands are unable to compensate for the extra water.
Turning water into steam is also not a great idea. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, albeit natural and part of the cycle. Generating the heat to make the steam in the first place would also produce green house gases because you’d probably be heating gas to boil the water.
A [monumental steam-powered pumping station](https://www.omropfryslan.nl/nieuws/1133050-woudagemaal-op-stoom-met-wateroverlast-voor-ons-het-mooiste-dat-er) in the Dutch village Lemmer was doing exactly that a couple weeks ago and has done so before too. It was running 24h due to high water because of heavy rainfall.
The article is in Dutch/Frisian and the video is in Frysian, but still might be interesting to watch.
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