To craft unstable shards you need pure light, the only use of pure light is crafting unstable gems which takes a lot less than crafting unstable shard gives you and use for power with refractor generators. My problem is that if you have excess pure light, you can't craft shards because the output will be blocked and there is really no way to know if you have enough space in the system for pure light from crafting 5 unstable shards required for crafting unstable gem.
Maybe allow refraction generator to be connected to circuits like an accumulator, so it would be possible to read how much light it contains? Or some additional way to store light with being able to read contents and perhaps vent it through some circuit controllable "pump".