A supernilpotent radical α is called bad if the class π(α) of all prime and α-semisimple rings consists of the one-element ring 0 only. We construct infinitely many bad supernilpotent radicals which form a generalization of Ryabukhin’s example of a supernilpotent nonspecial radical. We show that the family of all bad supernilpotent radicals is a sublattice of the lattice of all supernilpotent radicals and give examples of supernilpotent radicals that are not bad.

Let ρ be a supernilpotent radical. Let ρ* be the class of all rings A such that either A is a simple ring in ρ or the factor ring A/I is in ρ for every nonzero ideal I of A and every minimal ideal M of A is in ρ. Let be the lower radical determined by ρ* and let ρφ denote the upper radical determined by the class of all subdirectly irreducible rings with ρ-semisimple hearts. Le Roux and Heyman proved that is a supernilpotent radical with and they asked whether if ρ is replaced by β, ℒ , 𝒩 or 𝒥 , where β, ℒ , 𝒩 and 𝒥 denote the Baer, the Levitzki, the Koethe and the Jacobson radical, respectively. In the present paper we will give a negative answer to this question by showing that if ρ is a supernilpotent radical whose semisimple class contains a nonzero nonsimple * -ring without minimal ideals, then is a nonspecial radical and consequently . We recall that a prime ring A is a * -ring if A/I is in β for every .

It is proved that a regular essentially closed and weakly homomorphically closed proper subclass of rings consists of semiprime rings. A regular class M defines a supernilpotent upper radical if and only if M consists of semiprime rings and the essential cover Mk of M is contained in the semisimple class S U M. A regular essentially closed class M containing all semisimple prime rings, defines a special upper radical if and only if M satisfies condition (S): every M-ring is a subdirect sum of prime M-rings. Thus we obtained a characterization of semisimple classes of special radicals; a subclas S of rings is the semisimple class of a special radical if and only if S is regular, subdirectly closed, essentially closed, and satisfies condition (S). The results are valid for alternative rings too.