Built both to generate electricity and to irrigate the plains in the region, it was renamed in honour of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the founder of the Turkish Republic.

The dam and the hydroelectric power plant, which went into service after the upfilling of the reservoir was completed in 1992, are operated by the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ).

As the objectives for regional development have changed significantly and the ambitions have grown in the 1970s, the original plan underwent major modifications.

It consists of eight Francis turbine and generator groups of 300 MW each, supplied by Sulzer Escher Wyss and ABB Asea Brown Boveri respectively.

Hence, depending upon the energy demand and the state of the interconnected system, the amount of water to be released from the HEPP might vary between 200 and 2,000 m3/s in one day.

[12] Originating in the mountains of eastern Anatolia and flowing southwards to Syria and Iraq, the Euphrates and the Tigris are very irregular rivers, used to cause great problems each year with droughts in summer and flooding in winter.

Irrigation expansion within the Harran plains also increased Southeastern Anatolia's cotton production from 164,000 to 400,000 metric tons in 2001, or nearly sixty percent.

[17] About 90% of Euphrates' total annual flow originates in Turkey, while the remaining part is added in Syria, but nothing is contributed further downstream in Iraq.

One of the most important legal texts on the waters of the Euphrates-Tigris river system is the protocol annexed to the 1946 Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighborly Relations between Iraq and Turkey.

The protocol provided the control and management of the Euphrates and the Tigris depending to a large extent on the regulations of flow in Turkish source areas.

[14] Mid-January 1990, when the first phase of the dam was completed, Turkey held back the flow of the Euphrates entirely for a month to begin filling up the reservoir.

Turkey had notified Syria and Iraq by November 1989 of her decision to fill the reservoir over a period of one month explaining the technical reasons and providing a detailed program for making up for the losses.

It argues that Iraq and Syria in fact benefit from the regulated water by the dams as they protect all three riparian countries from seasonal droughts and floods.

The spatio-temporal evolution of seismicity and its source properties in relation to the temporal water-level variations and the stresses resulting from surface loading and pore-pressure diffusion shows the water-level and seismicity rate are anti-correlated in this dam,[21] which is explained by the stabilization effect of the gravitational induced stress imposed by water loading on the local faults.

The overall effective stress in the seismogenic zone increased over decades due to pore-pressure diffusion, explaining the enhanced background seismicity during recent years.