Mourou's Nobel lecture [1] has brief explanation of the envisioned process. The idea is to use intense laser pulses to accelerate deuterium ions into a tritium target. The deuterium-tritium fusion then generates high-energy neutrons that can transmutate nuclei.
This is probably not impossible, but I have doubts if this could be implemented efficiently at scale.
Doing dt fusion to make neutrons for other purposes is a pretty common technique in general. It sounds like the twist is using lasers to provide the energy instead of a traditional accelerator. Commercial neutron generators that exist now can approach fluxes comparable to that in small reactors, but the main difference is the energy distribution. Reactors are much more low-energy dominated so it's true that other reactions can become accessible with a high energy quasi monoenergetic source. However, i think we are still missing orders of magnitude of capability before it could become feasible. On top of that, laser based facilities like NIF are probably the most expensive and slowest-repeating way to generate neutrons right now. Plus when you make that many neutrons alot of other stuff will end up getting activated and pottentially become waste itself.
Personally i think there also need to be some nuclear chemistry advances to be able to efficiently and cleanly separate isotopes before they can be transmuted. There is some neat work being done on this by people at FRIB trying to extract medical isotopes etc from the beam dump.
This is probably not impossible, but I have doubts if this could be implemented efficiently at scale.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.91....