Restaurant owner John Sampson’s red delivery truck, loaded with a dozen take-out boxes, sweet tea and red velvet cake, rumbles down Highway 56 toward an isolated plot of Burke County land. Thousands of construction workers with limited options for dining out on their lunch break are the key to making him a richer man.

Sampson, like a handful of other restaurant owners, saw a lucrative opportunity to grow his business by catering to the workforce building two nuclear reactors at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle. With just a convenience store and a bar and grill near the construction site, Burke and Richmond County restaurants are capitalizing on food deliveries.

“It’s created a very positive cash flow,” Sampson said, minutes before hopping in his truck for his daily drive from Mike Padgett Highway to eastern Burke County.

Plant Vogtle’s $14 billion expansion project, the first new reactors built in the U.S. in three decades, employs 3,500 workers. The workforce will peak at 5,000 before the Westinghouse-designed AP 1000 reactors start producing power in 2017 and 2018.

Read more