The Tennessee River has its headwaters in
the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.
The main stream forms at Knoxville, where the Holston and the
French Broad rivers join.
The valley, 41,000 square miles in area, receives
an average of 52 inches of rain a year. In terms of water discharged
into the Ohio and Mississippi, the Tennessee River is about equal
in size to the Missouri.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has harnessed
the river with a multi-purpose system of dams and reservoirs
which regulates floods, improves navigation and generates electric
power.
High dams on the tributaries create large
storage reservoirs which hold back flood waters, releasing them
when necessary to maintain navigation depths downstream, and
at the same time generating electric power. The system also helps
protect the lower Ohio and Mississippi valleys.
The nine main river dams, with their locks,
form a navigation channel 650 miles long from Knoxville to the
Ohio River, an important arm of the nation's inland waterway
system connecting 20 states.
Having developed virtually all the river's
power resources, TVA has built huge coal-burning steam electric
plants to help serve the region's growing power needs. TVA power
is sold at wholesale to cities and rural electric cooperatives
which, in turn, distribute it at retail to homes, farms, business
and industry. A few industries and U.S. government defense installations
that use large amounts of power are served directly by TVA. The
largest of these, using more power than a great city, are the
atomic plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Paducah, Kentucky.
