Future of Steam Energy

Someone just made water boil without heating.

An article from Popsci:

Today in mind-bendingly cool stuff that nanoparticles can do: A team of researchers at Rice University in Texas has demonstrated a mechanism by which they can create steam in just seconds by focusing sunlight on a mixture of water and nanoparticles. This isn’t just some artificial means of lowering boiling point either; this solar powered “boiler” can produce steam before the water even gets warm to the touch, without ever bringing the aggregate water to a boil.

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The technology works by mixing a small amount of either carbon or gold-coated silicon dioxide nanoparticles, each just one-tenth the diameter of a single human hair, with water in a glass vessel. Their small diameters--smaller than the wavelength of visible light--means that they can absorb most of a light wave’s energy rather than scattering it. So when sunlight is focused on the vessel with a lens, the particles quickly become quite hot--hot enough to vaporize the water directly surrounding it.

This creates a bubble of steam that envelopes the nanoparticle, which is now insulated from the cooler liquid water by the steam, which allows it to grow hotter still, vaporizing more of the water immediately around it. At some point the nanoparticle and its steam envelope become large enough to grow buoyant, at which point the whole steam bubble--particle and all--floats to the surface. The steam is released into the air, the particle falls back into the cooler water and sinks back down until it begins to absorb sunlight and heat again, at which point the process starts all over.

 That's amazing. Right now, all we have to turn turbines with steam is through nuclear plants and polluting coal plants (on top of hydroelectric dams and so on). This, if it succeeds in progressing to industrial scale, is going to be the game changer of clean energy.

But then again, what if this becomes a weapon instead? Imagine the oceans evaporating themselves at a higher rate than they are evaporating now...(shudder)