I think the reaction would have been muted by the fact that the project was long gone by the time the details were widely known. And the danger of radiation was

I think the reaction would have been muted by the fact that the project was long gone by the time the details were widely known. And the danger of radiation was also not widely appreciated until the 50s. I used to work a few years ago in/around some of the Columbia buildings used by the project, where the football-players-trucking-uranium-through-the-tunnels story was well-known. The story ended with: those players all died young, mostly from cancer. Maybe that part of the story is harder to confirm; it was left out of the OP.