Of course it can, just short the generator coils and you have a free brake. The turbine should then still have resistance and shouldn't overspeed. Or just idk, use it to pump some water in a loop or discharge through some resistors. Getting rid of power isn't that hard if you want to do it. Simplest solution would I suppose be to just have an outside radiator that brings the steam to cooling tower levels of manageability so you can throttle the turbine with just a valve.

The thing is, they don't really want to do it if they can save fuel by shutting down.

> "just short the generator coils and you have a free brake"

You'll soon end up with a burning/melted generator.

> "pump some water in a loop"

OK, but you're going to need huge pumps (1000+ MW!). Expensive.

> "or discharge through some resistors"

Again, you'll need extremely large resistors, and a way to dissipate an awful lot of heat. We're talking about a huge amount of energy here!

sadly, my searches for "gigawatt resistor" and "gigawatt electric load" have been fruitless.

try "reserve ultimate heat sink" instead of "gigawatt resistor"

Pump water in a loop through a radiator to cool the braking generators and the resistor bank :P

Could try also melting some salt on the side.