Amazon has applied to discharge up to 280,000 gallons a day of non-contact cooling water into Sedges Creek, an ephemeral stream feeding Lake Anna, from a 150-acre Louisa County campus next to Dominion Energy's North Anna nuclear plant1. Virginia's DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) holds a public hearing at Louisa County Middle School on 9 June 2026, then decides whether to grant the VPDES (Virginia Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permit, the state framework that governs industrial water discharge.
A second Amazon facility already discharges up to 460,000 gallons a day into Northeast Creek. The water is pretreated with sulphuric acid, sodium hydroxide and other chemicals, and DEQ caps metals, temperature and chlorine. Virginia sets no PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the "forever chemicals") testing requirement for data-centre discharge, which is the residents' central objection going into the hearing.
Ephemeral streams carry little water for much of the year, so their dilution capacity is low and concentration limits matter more than the gallon figure. The testing gap, not the volume, drives the objections: a permit can be lawful and still leave the community's worry unmeasured. This is the cost pushed onto a watershed and argued after the fact, the same pattern as Amazon's $20.5m Boardman nitrate settlement and the Microsoft water suit in Wisconsin.
