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?

Question

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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Answer 1

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.