One of the biggest challenges facing the nuclear industry today is the storage and disposal of waste that will remain radioactive for millions of years. One approach to this problem involves bombarding the waste with neutrons to speed up the decay of long-lived isotopes into nuclei with much shorter half-lives. However, physicists in the UK and Germany have now demonstrated a new laser-driven approach to “transmutation” by converting iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15.7 million years, into iodine-128. The half-life of this lighter isotope is just 25 minutes (K Ledingham et al. 2003 J. Phys. D36 L79).