Melton Hill Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Clinch River just south of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. The dam is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the dam in the early 1960s to extend the Tennessee Valley's continuous navigation channel up the Clinch as far as Clinton and to increase TVA's overall power-generating capacity. The dam impounds the Melton Hill Lake, and is the only TVA tributary dam serviced by a navigation lock. The dam and associated infrastructure were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
Melton Hill Dam was named for a knob atop nearby Copper Ridge where the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey installed a triangulation station in 1884.
Location
The Clinch River flows southwestward for from its source in southwestern Virginia through the hills of northeastern Tennessee before emptying into the Tennessee River at Kingston. Melton Hill Dam is located upstream from the mouth of the Clinch, stretching across the Roane-Loudon county line. Melton Hill's tailwaters are part of Watts Bar Lake, a main Tennessee River channel impoundment that extends across the lower of the Clinch. Melton Hill is the newer of two dams on the lower Clinch, the other being Norris Dam, located upstream from Melton Hill.
Capacity
Melton Hill is a concrete gravity-type dam with an electric power generation capacity of 79 megawatts. The dam is 103 feet (31 m) high and stretches 1,020 feet (311 m) across the Clinch River. The dam is equipped with a 3-bay spillway that has a total discharge of 118,000 cubic feet (3,341 cubic meters) per second.