u/huyvanbin

It seems that the reckless nature of the RBMK design and how it was operated all stems from a political decision to boost electrical generation at all costs.

Of course having more energy is obviously a good thing all things being equal but what specifically were the factors behind the leadership deciding that this was a priority?

This is brought into focus by this quote from Chernobyl witness:

And if I shut down the reactor they will tan my hide. After all we are always chasing the plan... And for such a reason as the number of control rods we never had a shutdown, not once... I think they would have chased me out of my job.

And:

And our unit—at that point it was at 1500 MW, that is 50% power—had to keep working. A normal situation, overall, it happened all the time. We were in the MinEnergo system, after all. We prayed to the Plan, for kilowatt-hours and all the rest.

Perhaps this was just the Soviet management style but it seems unusual for power plant operators to be fixated on producing more power as opposed to sufficient power. And as far as I know the power grid was stable at this time and homes in Kyiv had electricity. So what was all this extra energy needed for?