Awful reporting about a bad idea. The actual proposal isn't to irradiate nuclear waste with lasers. The idea is to use the laser to accelerate protons, irradi

Awful reporting about a bad idea. The actual proposal isn't to irradiate nuclear waste with lasers. The idea is to use the laser to accelerate protons, irradiate heavy nuclei with those protons to get them to either fission or at least emit neutrons, irradiate long-lived waste with those neutrons to transmute it. It's possible in theory. In practice, it's nonsense. These accelerators have low efficiency and produce few neutrons. This makes the process slow and inefficient. So inefficient in fact, that all practical (for small values of "practical") proposals are actually for sub-critical reactors that use nuclear fission to amplify the neutron output. But then the idiocy becomes clear: instead of a sub-critical reactor and an unbelievably expensive accelerator, you might as well build a critical reactor, recycle the actinides directly and maybe transmute the fission products. In other words, this is a guy who just likes particle accelerators. He has a solution, now he's looking for a suitable problem.