Honeymoon is a sandstone-hosted paleochannel deposit, which is a precise way of saying the uranium lies in the buried bed of an ancient river. Long ago, groundwater carried dissolved uranium through porous sand until chemical conditions made it drop out and concentrate, lining the old channel with ore. The deposit was found in 1972 by a joint venture of mining subsidiaries - companies tied to CSR, Mount Isa Mines and the American firm United Nuclear - prospecting the Frome Embayment, a region that also hosts the Beverley and Four Mile uranium deposits. Geology made the mining method almost inevitable: because the uranium sits in permeable sand below the water table, it can be recovered by in-situ leach, sending fluids through the ground rather than carving the ground apart.

Honeymoon kept arriving at the right place at the wrong moment. In 1981 the operator submitted a final environmental impact statement, and in 1982 built a $3.5 million demonstration plant - a small wellfield of three five-spot leach patterns feeding a processing unit designed to handle pregnant solution at 25 litres per second. Then politics intervened. A change of government in both the state and the Commonwealth saw approval to mine deferred, and in June 1983 the whole project was mothballed before the pilot had properly begun. Ownership passed through a chain of hands across the decades - MIM Holdings, Southern Cross Resources, and eventually Uranium One, itself a subsidiary of Russia's state atomic corporation, Rosatom. Commercial production finally began in 2011.

The mine's first life was brief and bruising. From 2011 to 2013 Honeymoon produced just 312 tonnes of uranium before the economics turned against it. In November 2013 Uranium One cited "continuing difficulties in the production process and issues in attaining design capacity, combined with high mine operation costs," and shut the operation down. With uranium prices sliding in the long aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the mine was placed on care and maintenance - kept intact but idle, waiting for the market to recover. In September 2015, Rosatom's Uranium One sold the project to the Australian company Boss Resources for around nine million dollars, a fraction of what had been poured into it. For years afterward, Honeymoon sat silent in the desert, a finished plant with nothing to do.

The wait finally paid off. Riding a renewed surge in uranium demand, Boss Energy rebuilt and restarted the operation, and in April 2024 Honeymoon poured its first drum of uranium in more than a decade. By January 2025 the mine had reached commercial production, this time pairing in-situ recovery with ion-exchange technology to lift its output. It is now Australia's second operating in-situ recovery uranium mine, supplying nuclear utilities a world away in Europe. Honeymoon's restart says something about the strange tempo of nuclear fuel: a deposit can lie known and untouched for fifty years, then come roaring back when the price is right. Out here on the plains 80 kilometres northwest of Broken Hill, the ancient buried riverbed is giving up its uranium at last - quietly, through a forest of pipes, leaving the surface almost untouched.