Lake Jocassee Dam, South Carolina

The dam that forms Lake Jocassee has four pump/turbines in it, which pump water up from Lake Keowee, and generate 774 megawatts of power when it flows back down. It is part of Duke Power’s regional Keowee-Toxaway Hydroelectric Project, a series of reservoirs, dams, and hydro plants built in the early 1970s, to provide regional flood control and power production, and stable cooling water for the Oconee nuclear power plant. The plant, with three reactors, was the largest nuclear power plant in the world when it opened in 1973. The Keowee-Toxaway project flooded more than 40 square miles of territory, forming two large reservoirs, the rambling 20 mile-long Lake Keowee, which is heavily developed, and the 7,500 acre Lake Jocassee, which is mostly undeveloped, and serves as a storage and flood control reservoir for Duke’s system, and is the lower reservoir for another pumped storage project known as Bad Creek. The completion of the dam forming Lake Jocassee in 1970, and flood waters rising behind it, was depicted in the opening sequence of the 1971 film Deliverance, an influential film which laments the loss of landscapes to hydroelectric projects in the south (among other things).