The Role of TVA During WWII
Secret Military Facilities
During the era of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal was cause for great celebration and much needed jobs in rural East Tennessee. During this time period, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was called upon to erect the first dam in the TVA system.
The site for this dam was Norris, TN. One of two cities in Anderson County built by the federal government, Norris began as a planned community developed by TVA in 1933 to house the workers building Norris Dam. Approximately 2,900 families were displaced from reservoir lands during construction. Later, the homes were purchased by the town’s residents, and the town was incorporated in 1949.
Norris Dam is a hydroelectric and flood-control structure located on the Clinch River. Designed by architect Roland Wank, construction on the dam began in October 1933 and was completed in March 1936. The project cost $36 million.
The enormous amount of power needed to fuel the production of nuclear materials was one of the reasons the Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge was built where it was. Nuclear-materials production was both delicate and potentially dangerous. It required plenty of fresh water for cooling and a place that was not in danger of flooding.
For three years, the Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge used millions of kilowatts of TVA energy. Not even the TVA chairman knew this until August 1945, when the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.
The electricity provided by Norris Dam, sixteen miles upstream from Oak Ridge, helped to run the facilities in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. But that wasn’t the only role TVA played during WWII.
In 1935, TVA’s chairman, Arthur Morgan, testified before Congress that “an adequate supply of electric energy comes pretty close to being a matter of national defense.” Over the next six years, TVA geared up its energy capacity to be ready in the event of war.
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