Taleyarkhan's failures alone shouldn't rule out a concept, agreed. A bigger problem is that although sonofusion does appear capable of creating small plasmas which in theory could be hot and dense enough for fusion, the amount of time during which the plasma remains at that temperature and density seems to be too small. In other words, there seems to be insufficient containment.

A common misconception about fusion is that containment is all about keeping the particles from leaving. But often, it is more about keeping the energy from leaving. A momentum-based containment design like sonofusion uses is subject to Rayleigh instabilities which carry the energy away in fast moving particles.