After Hiroshima and during the cold war nuclear energy was associated with death and destruction. Hiroshima for obvious reasons, and the cold war because the population of the western world was constantly reminded how The Soviet Union had thousands of missiles with nuclear bombs pointing at us, ready to go. Western governments used nuclear weapons to picture the threat and to terrify populations into spending more on defense against the Soviets. There were scary videos of mushroom clouds, scary instructions on how to survive a nuclear blast, and scary stories of how a nuclear winter would pan out.
This, obviously, made people scared of nuclear bombs, and nuclear energy in general. Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.
The byproduct of all this cold war propoganda was that people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants.
If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc. Yet we think of it as getting power from the devil.
I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy.
Here's one of the old propaganda videos from the US, "Duck and cover" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MVJIU0gFk