system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5- how is radioactive waste properly “disposed of”

Does anybody know the process?
gpt
You put it in the ground very far away from anywhere any human is likely to return to (and where water or whatever can't move it close to any such place), and leave it to naturally calm down over centuries or millennia.

There's nothing else you can do to it, really. Since the problem is with the atoms themselves and not their chemistry, you can't put them into some chemical compound where they'll be safer. You literally just have to wait. In theory you could put it in a particle accelerator and try and blast the atoms apart into safer things, but that's *absurdly* energy-intensive and extremely slow, and there's no guarantee you'd end up with something that's actually safer in the end.

As a side note, the stuff that's really seriously problematic is the stuff that's *middlingly* radioactive. Really intensely radioactive stuff decays fast enough that it takes days or weeks for it to mostly have converted to other things. Stuff with half-lives on the order of years to centuries is the really awful stuff, because it's still more than radioactive enough to be dangerous but hangs around for long enough that you have to find some sort of permanent disposal solution for it - you can't just leave it in a shielded box in your lab for a few weeks.