I wonder if they can stop the reaction once started (if for some reason they wanted to) or once started it goes Energizer Bunny for 50 years.
I can’t access that article there, but I do recall running across it in the past.
IIRC its totally self regulating. You send in cold water into the automated part and you get out really hot water (steam). You send in very little cold water and out comes very little really hot water. You send in much cold water and you get out much really hot water.
Its not like once it starts you gotta keep getting the power out of it at full bore or else. If you quit drawing out power (in the form of heat), it naturally and automatically due to the laws of physics produces much less power.
The way you do this is you design a reactor core that as it gets “too” hot it shuts down because all the parts expand too much (and some other stuff). So, when you quit drawing out heat, it starts to get “too” hot and shuts itself down.
Wouldn’t this produce a yo-yo effect? As it gets hot it slows down, as it slows down it cools and the material shrinks and heats up. Rinse and repeat.
I would think it would just settle into some equilibrium and keep going.
Like any dynamic system capable of ocsillations with feedback it depends on the parameters.
Obviously, its a lot more complicated than the couple sentence explaination I gave, but if the parameters are engineered right you do not get a yo-yo effect, you get an equilibrium in which the amount of power its producing is approximately proportional to the amount of heat you are drawing out (which is approximately proportional to how much water you are pumping through it), so the pesky humans don’t need to be adjusting the reactor itself, risking an accident due to improper fiddling.
Its not so much that its actually shutting down or starting up, its varying the amount of power it produces.