Cleaning and maintenance at nuclear power plants are very important and dedicated procedures. There are usually two or more major buildings comprising a typical plant, each with scheduled shutdowns for cleaning. To give an idea of the enormity of the HEPA vacuum cleanup required, the vapor containment (VC) areas alone can each average four levels totaling about 120,000 square feet of floor space for wet and drypickup. HEPA vacuums are also used to clean the reactor cavity, running some thirty feet deep, the integrated crane, and even the debris inside extensive configurations of pipes in a plant. Since painting is an ongoing maintenance procedure at these plants, HEPA vacuums are used to remove paint chips and swarf after scraping prior to new paint application.

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