Isn't their plan B being an economical way of generating helium-3? Their power generation plan sounds dubious but the helium-3 production might make some sense.
It's like taking an idea hostage. If you fail to pull it off, you make sure that nobody else has the chance to try it without first paying you for that privilege. It's supposed to help somehow.
Intellectual Property - so there might be trade secrets, patents, etc developed in the course of research. Even if the business goes bust, they might have learned valuable lessons.
They definitely have valuable IP already: whatever slide deck/demo reel/kompromat they used to pull this nonsense off is clearly worth its weight in unobtanium.
It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.
If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.
I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.
It’s a sliding scale in the end. You can have a fusion system that barely breaks even, or only slightly breaks even, and then is still more expensive than traditional energy sources after factoring in fixed costs and maintenance.
Even then, are there no sales possible? I'd think that a borderline fusion reactor would be commercially viable if only for research. You could probably sell a dozen of those around the world. But unless something really weird's going on with the physics, a borderline system is just the mark 1, and everyone expects mark 2 to be more efficient.
For example, a DT fusion reactor based on ITER would be two orders of magnitude larger (in volume and mass) than a fission reactor of the same power output. It might "work" in some technical sense, but be completely economically impractical.