What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.
The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.
One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.
And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.
Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.