glass originally comes from sands.

So mix them in with these like pretty abundant starting materials, melt it all down.

And then you'd have a solid chunk of waste that can basically be stored in a much smaller amount of area because it's smaller than liquid waste.

And also encased in some sort of metal and then safely stored somewhere away from people.

So vitrification is a broad term that means transforming something into a glassy solid.

And the great thing about glassy solids is that there's no uniform crystal structure within that solid.

And vitrification goes beyond nuclear waste.

Tell me about some stuff that you learned while reporting this that didn't quite have a place in the article.