Plastic products you use every day can be manufactured using nuclear process heat.
Plastics
Chances are, plastics play a major role in your lifestyle. On a typical bike path, you may notice a plastic stroller pushed by a mom holding a water bottle and listening to her MP3 player. What you may not know about plastic is how much energy it takes to create those useful materials. It takes extreme heat (300 to 720°C) in order to refine petroleum to produce the plastic items we use every day.
In fact, the production of plastics from raw materials consumes nearly 6 percent of all the energy used by U.S. industries. The heat to refine the materials is created by burning fossil fuels and can significantly contribute to carbon dioxide emissions.
Replacing the fossil fuel energy with the heat from a high temperature gas-cooled reactor eliminates carbon dioxide emissions from the refining and production processes that create plastics.