This is a story about an industrial accident involving atomics. In this era, 1942, atomic energy has been discovered as a theoretical possibility but not demonstrated -- this is pre-atom bomb by a couple years (1945). As a result there is a lot of fascination with atomic energy as this is being written, but little of the iconic dread that now characterizes thinking about nuclear. There is some, as this story reflects, but not nearly as much.
In this tale atomic product use is widespread and atomics are used for many, many things besides energy creation. In this story the product being created is a nuclear pesticide, and the short half-life is a benefit. Neat concept!
As in Requiem, written about above, smoking is a nasty habit, but quite tolerated. There is a little more use of advanced communication in this story than in Requiem -- we have video telephones, but still not much. We have no real-time video monitoring of events, and no computerized process control and the phone lines are still connected manually by human operators (called operators, for those of you too young to have dealt with them).
We do have government concern about the safety of events happening in a nuclear plant -- Del Ray writes about this as powerful stuff still mixed with some uncertainty. We do have an evacuation plan in place, so that part of the power of nuclear is recognized, but the preparations are based more on the nature of dealing with a massive chemicals-making disaster, such as Bhopal was in real life.
Once again, computers and communication are not anticipated well -- we have manual operators pulling and pushing electric cords to make connections and no video surveillance in place.
However, the confusion of "what's happening?" when a disaster happens remains consistent with modern practice.
Del Ray does some interesting speculations on how atomics will react with biology. For instance, he has radiation photons/particles capable of causing nerves to fire. They aren't right, but they are consistent, which makes this story good technofiction.
This story remains interesting because Del Ray's people remain believable. They have good reactions to their situation and Del Ray unfolds their situation in a fashion consistent with a lot of confusion, which is the heart of any disaster, ancient or modern. And, again, his technology remains internally consistent.
One other social change I noted: in his story a bit of strong drink fortifies a person. He offers a round to the workers who get patched up and head back for more.
Even though no one has yet experienced it, Del Ray does threaten everyone at the scene with some kind of nuclear "big boom", and this is why the governor and the military are called in when the magnitude of this disaster becomes clear. That potential for nuclear is already well recognized by this time.
This story has a lot of twists and turns in it. It's not simple. There's a lot of back story to all of the principle characters -- most of it in medicine and atomic engineering.