Probably didn't help that for much of the cold war Germany was a likely candidate for "ground zero" of a nuclear exchange. I think living under that might reasonably influence people's attitudes.
Conflation between weapons and generators was weird then - and it is fossil idiocy at this point. There was a grain of truth at the time when all civilian nuclear programs were the flipside of military programs, but even then the imagery of mushroom clouds over power plants was either ignorant or dishonest.
Yes, I agree, I think a large part of it came from people not understanding the physics.
Even in my physics class in high school, when we spoke about the reactor in Kalkar and watched several documentaries about Chernobyl, our teachers made it seem like explosions from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons would be the same in yield. Which is an outright lie, given a nuclear reactor usually explodes from a steam or hydrogen explosion.
