Epoxy

Lake Keowee

Oconee County, South Carolina, USA

Also known as Keowee-Toxaway, Lake Jocassee, Oconee County, Salem SC

This lake was dug deeper than the valley required, because a nuclear plant needed the volume.

Duke Power began clearing the basin in 1967. Woods were burned to let the bulldozers work, and parts of the floor were excavated below the natural grade so the reservoir would hold enough water to cool the reactors going up beside it. Keowee Hydro started generating in April 1971. The first unit at Oconee Nuclear Station came online in 1973.

The result is a lake that is also a component. More than five million gallons run from Keowee into the hydro station's power tunnel to make 157 megawatts, and the same water stands ready as the cooling supply next door. Upstream, Lake Jocassee works as a battery, water pumped uphill when power is cheap and let back down through four turbines when it is not.

Everything released here carries on into Lake Hartwell, then eventually to the Atlantic at Savannah.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: May 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Walnut, inset, with a black border groove running the perimeter.

Keowee is the most demanding shoreline shape we deal with. A reservoir this size, filled into a valley of ridges and creeks, produces a coast that is almost entirely fingers. Dozens of narrow arms run off the main body, most of them branching again into smaller ones, and the tips come down to points a few millimetres across. Every one gets dammed on both sides at half an inch out, and where two arms sit close the dam walls from each nearly meet in between.

Twenty miles of lake and roughly three hundred miles of shoreline, compressed onto a board this size. That ratio is what makes it long work rather than large work.

Two colours, the water and the black. The black does the border, the lettering, the north arrow and the small marker up at the north end. The arrow and the marker are syringe fills, being too fine to dam.