Qualla: Wiluna uranium mine

Wiluna uranium mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some mines are defined by what they produce. This one is defined by what it has not. The Wiluna uranium mine, on the salt-crusted country roughly 30 kilometres south of the old gold town of Wiluna, holds a strange distinction: in 2013 it became the first uranium project to clear every regulatory hurdle in Western Australia after the state lifted its ban in 2008. It won state approval, then federal sign-off. And then - nothing. Year after year passed with the approvals in hand and the ground undisturbed. The mine remains a proposal, a deposit, an argument, and a promise that has not yet been kept.

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Wiluna uranium mine: Yellow Ore Near the Surface

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Wiluna uranium mine: A First That Changed Little

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Wiluna uranium mine: On Whose Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Wiluna uranium mine: A Mine in Suspension

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wh...

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