The uranium here is owned by Toro Energy and sits in the calcrete margins of two ephemeral salt lakes, Lake Way and Centipede. It is carnotite - a bright yellow uranium-vanadium mineral - lying in shallow, sheet-like layers only a few metres down, at or below the water table. The deposits are low-grade and spread thin, the kind of ore that makes sense only at scale and with patience. The original plan was straightforward in outline: open-cut pits at Lake Way and Centipede, the uranium oxide concentrated on site, then sealed in containers and trucked across the continent to Port Adelaide for export. Over a projected 14-year life, the mine was designed to produce roughly 1,200 tonnes of uranium oxide per year.

The approvals were genuinely historic. The Western Australian environment minister cleared the project in October 2012, and the federal government granted environmental approval under the EPBC Act in April 2013 - the first uranium mine to pass that gauntlet in the state since the ban fell in 2008. Toro spoke of commissioning the mine that same year and making first sales by 2014 or 2015. The company even sought to expand, winning EPA approval in 2016 to add the Lake Maitland and Millipede deposits. But timelines slipped and then dissolved. As of 2020, mining had still not begun. A landmark approval, it turned out, was not the same as a working mine - the gap between the two filled with the realities of uranium prices, finance, and a community that had not finished having its say.

This ground belongs, in law and in far deeper ways, to the Wiluna People - Martu and Tjupan traditional owners whose native title was formally recognised in determinations effective from January 2015, covering almost 48,000 square kilometres that include three of the four uranium deposits. Toro reached a mining agreement with the Wiluna People after more than seven years of negotiation, ratified in a community meeting. But agreement was never unanimous, and opposition ran deep and sustained. From 2011, the Walkatjurra Walkabout - a months-long walk from Wiluna toward Perth - carried the message of those who did not want uranium taken from their land. 'Everybody has said no,' one Martu man put it. The story of this mine cannot be told without that 'no' sitting inside it, unresolved.

More than a decade after its historic approvals, the Wiluna uranium mine remains exactly that - approved, planned, expanded on paper, and unbuilt. The carnotite still lies in the calcrete a few metres beneath the salt. The trucks to Port Adelaide have never rolled. In a region whose entire economy has been written and rewritten by the rise and fall of commodity prices, Wiluna's uranium is a project waiting for a moment that has not arrived: high enough prices, secured financing, and a settled social licence on contested country. Whether that moment ever comes is, like so much else out here, a matter of patience and the market.