I have looked at the French article quoted in this but neither that one is more explicit.

In the initial article, an allusion is made to what happens if you irradiate nuclear waste with gamma rays, which extract neutrons, or some times protons, from nuclei, transforming the radioactive nuclei into other isotopes with much shorter lifetime.

However, that method does not work for waste treatment, because there is no gamma-ray source of sufficient intensity to treat a macroscopic quantity of waste.

Then the article talks about lasers with record high impulse power, but there is no connection between these 2, no matter how high the intensity of the laser pulse, the frequency of the light is too low to transmute nuclei.

It is true that multi-photon reactions are possible with very high-intensity pulses, but for transforming nuclei about a million photons would have to take part in each reaction. The probability of such a reaction is astronomically low.

Another way to cause reactions that need high-energy photons, by using laser pulses, is like in the deep UV lithography for up-to-date CMOS processes, by producing hot plasma with the laser pulses. However even this method can produce only soft X rays, not the hard gamma rays needed for transmuting nuclear waste.

But there is a much stronger reason why this method cannot be useful, even if it could work.

The nuclear waste nuclei with a long lifetime have such a long lifetime because they have only a small energy excess over stable nuclei.

When you transmute them into nuclei with a short lifetime, those have a much higher energy excess, so you must provide energy for the transmutation.

If this method of treating nuclear waste would be possible and it would be employed, then the global fission reaction from U235 to fission products will be changed, replacing the low-energy products with high-energy products, so the total energy produced by a nuclear reactor, which is the difference between the energy stored in the input fuel and the energy stored in the output products, would be diminished with the value needed for waste treatment, which would be similar in magnitude with the energy produced by the nuclear reactor.

Depending on the exact reactions used for waste treatment, a complex computation of the energy would be needed, but after taking into consideration the very low efficiency of the intermediate devices used, like lasers, it would not be surprising if the energy output of a nuclear reactor would be diminished 10 times or more, making nuclear energy completely noncompetitive.

So, no, this does not have any chance.

What would be a real breakthrough would be if it would be possible to extract energy from a nuclear reaction where the products are non-radioactive, because this would solve the waste problem, while simultaneously providing a maximum energy output.

Unfortunately this is hopeless for fission reactions, because those cannot have unique output products, and among the many possible output nuclei it is certain that some will be radioactive.

This is also hopeless for deuterium or tritium fusion reactions, because those are guaranteed to generate huge amounts of neutrons.

Other more difficult fusion reactions without radioactive output nuclei are theoretically possible, but no practical method to perform them is known yet.