Lake Anna

Lake Anna is a reservoir in Louisa, Spotsylvania and Orange counties in central Virginia, created in the early 1970s by damming the North Anna River. Dominion Energy's North Anna Power Station uses it as a primary condenser-cooling source, and the reservoir was designed partly for that function: a dike divides it into a warm-water section used for cooling discharge return and a main recreational section. It covers approximately 13,000 acres at normal pool and is popular for boating, fishing and lakeside property, with hundreds of private homes on its shoreline.

Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality issued Amazon a final wastewater permit on 21 July 2026 for its Lake Anna data-centre campus, authorising up to 280,000 gallons a day of pretreated cooling water into Sedges Creek from 1 August . Under its terms, discharge cannot exceed 89.6°F on any given day, and Amazon must set aside $25,000 for every private well the campus sits within a mile of, plus a further $500,000 should neighbours' water supply be affected; the permit carries no PFAS testing obligation, extending Virginia's existing regulatory practice. A second Amazon facility already discharges up to 460,000 gallons a day into Northeast Creek, another Lake Anna tributary.

Both the recreational community and Dominion depend on the lake's water quality: residents for swimming and fishing, Dominion for NRC-regulated cooling-water intake standards. The lake's thermal budget, the additional heat it can absorb before fish-kill or NRC compliance thresholds are reached, is now drawn upon by nuclear generation and two Amazon discharges simultaneously, with no PFAS monitoring on either stream.