There is a lot of sense in this. From youth we've been trained that nuclear radiation is associated with cancer, Godzilla and mutant fish. My own irrational hate of Nuclear Fission plants comes from the hard learned lessons of Civilization 3; which teaches one to avoid building Nuclear plants due to the incredible rate of meltdowns and the subsequent massive death count and many turn loss of productive tiles. And global warming. Given all that, the level of trepidation around them should not come as a surprise. And if that isn't bad enough, fission plants are like airplanes. Crashes I mean.
People are afraid of Airplanes despite their incredible safety record because failure is spectacular and newsworthy. Consequence is concentrated and easily compartmentalized vs the more background event of the relatively near constant death from cars/coal (I wonder if this is leakage due to the brain reusing the smell cancellation modules on abstract frequencies like death rate). Similarly, the impact of meltdowns can be more viscerally felt in terms of relocation and ghost towning - even if they lead to little to no measured cancers or ill health (the worst case of incompetency in the form of Chernobyl is a fraction of the time integral health/death/radiative burden of coal plants to locals and workers). And to top it off, damage can be easily visualized in terms of three eyed fish, Godzilla and those ugly, ugly orange tiles. Shiver. Availability Heuristic at work.
At the same time I believe there is some cause for apprehension. It has to do with what the state current US infrastructure suggests on the real risks of a plant; failure of which might trigger an AI Winter type event at the worst possible time. The risk of Fission Plants is mainly in human competency and complacency. Will there be any corners cut in design and will operators become complacent due to extended runs of non-events? Will vital maintenance be done? I have not seen evidence that much of the world is ready for that kind of thing. The west is yes, mostly, but as the rest of the world comes online it would be preferable to have clean energy that doesn't jump to 50% chance of meltdown during revolts. So looking at alternative replacements at the same time as - instead of just focusing on -Nuclear is worthwhile.
A single large failure and human reaction to that kind of thing will lead to cascading moving away from Nuclear at just the time when it is most needed. It is thus in my opinion, better to do limited roll outs on newer incompetency resistant designs before any universal switching. Education on the nature of different types of radiation and their effects (focus on neutron vs bio, halflives vs waste), drastically reduced dangers to workers of nuclear vs coal plants, unloading the weighting on the bomb aspect of nuclear, probability theory, and shining a clarifying light on the stellar safety record of nuclear plants; will all go a long way towards solving the world's future energy problems.
As for me, while (I think) Civ 5 doesn't have that stupid penalty, the damage is already done. I will always recommend Solar and Hydro in place of Nuclear.