A lot of us grew up in the time of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Combined with a lot of media about radioactivity's dangers (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/nyregion/babies-teeth-and...). I think that has strongly affected people's perception of risk.

I used to work at UC Berkeley, and one of the buildings on campus previously held a research nuclear reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Research_Reactor). There's a sign there now "Nuclear Free Zone"; (https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-berkeley-nuclear-free-...).

Note that they did have to do extensive decontamination on Gilman Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formerly_Utilized_Sites_Remedi...) where plutonium was first isolated.