How do control rods in nuclear reactors work?

Question

How do control rods in nuclear reactors work?

In: 221

Answer 1

I’ll explain it in monkey terms

You know how a bunch of monkeys love to play a game where they throw bananas to each other? Now, imagine if every time a monkey catches a banana, it splits into two bananas, and then those bananas are thrown to other monkeys who haven’t caught one yet. This makes the game faster and faster because more bananas are being thrown around.

But what if the game gets too wild and we need to calm it down? That’s when we introduce banana catchers (these are our control rods). These are special monkeys whose job is to catch the bananas but they don’t throw them back.

So, the more banana catchers we have, the slower the game becomes, because fewer bananas are being thrown around. If the game is going too slow, we can ask some banana catchers to leave. If it’s going too fast, we can bring in more banana catchers.

In a nuclear reactor, the splitting of atoms (uranium or plutonium) is like the bananas splitting, and the control rods are like the banana catchers. Their job is to slow down the reaction and keep everything under control.