A confidential Sovietologist was a student of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex, and he (or she) has long been mystified by the near-universal belief in the west that the Soviet RBMK reactor design was chosen in order to produce weapons-grade plutonium for the Soviet military. Although it is possible that experiments were done at the first RBMKs in the 1970s to see if it was possible for these reactors to produce weapons-grade material, the fact of the matter is that the RBMK design was chosen for other reasons, and that they are not used for plutonium production.
In fact, RBMK fuel is generally not reprocessed. The WNA, however, indicates that the Soviet-designed RBMK - aka reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny, high-power channel reactor - is a pressurized water-cooled reactor with individual fuel channels and using graphite as its moderator. It is also known as the light water graphite reactor - LWGR. It is very different from most other power reactor designs as it derived from a design principally for plutonium production and was intended and used in Russia for both plutonium and power production.
WNA Ref - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Appendices/RBMK-Reactors/
IAEA Report: http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf
The basic rationale behind the RBMK was the desire of the Soviet government to produce large nuclear power plants as inexpensively as possible. The RBMK met this goal well, but sacrificed safety in order to do so. One of the main attractions of the RBMK was that it was built out of modular components that could be produced by existing Soviet industry. At the time the first RBMK-1000 was being built at Leningrad in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had extreme difficulty manufacturing the forgings needed for large pressurized water reactors. The RBMK could also operate using low-enriched uranium oxide fuel- 2.0-2.4 per cent U-235.
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