IOW, we're never going to break even. You and I are paying now, and would in any case never get any of the revenue, if in fact any could be had.

But we are supporting the careers and research of plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their students, and a few of them might do other, actually useful, and anyway wholly unpredictable things, later. With a good measure of luck, none of those things will build up to any world-spanning catastrophes the way the steam engine did.