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: the lake is divided by a dike into a warm-water section (the "private" lake, used for cooling discharge return) and the main recreational section. It covers approximately 13,000 acres at normal pool. The lake is popular for recreational boating, fishing, and lakeside property, with hundreds of private homes on its shoreline.

The reservoir's significance for the data-centre boom arises from its position as the receiving water body — via the Sedges Creek tributary — for Amazon's proposed cooling-water discharge from a 150-acre Louisa County campus adjacent to North Anna. Amazon has applied to Virginia DEQ for a VPDES permit to discharge up to 280,000 gallons a day of pretreated non-contact cooling water into Sedges Creek . A second Amazon facility already discharges up to 460,000 gallons a day into Northeast Creek, another Lake Anna tributary. The cumulative discharge into the lake's watershed is the context in which the VPDES hearing must be read.

Both the recreational community and Dominion have interests in Lake Anna's water quality: residents use it for swimming and fishing, while Dominion requires it to meet NRC-regulated cooling-water intake standards for North Anna. The lake's thermal budget — how much additional heat the reservoir can absorb before fish-kill or NRC compliance thresholds are reached — is a finite shared resource now being drawn upon by nuclear generation and data-centre cooling simultaneously.