Radical Semigroup Rings and the Thue--Morse Semigroup

Let R be an associative ring with unit, let S be a semigroup with zero, and let RS be a contracted semigroup ring. It is proved that if RS is radical in the sense of Jacobson and if the element 1 has infinite additive order, then S is a locally finite nilsemigroup. Further, for any semigroup S, there is a semigroup T S such that the ring RT is radical in the Brown--McCoy sense. Let S be the semigroup of subwords of the sequence abbabaabbaababbab..., and let F be the two-element field. Then the ring FS is radical in the Brown--McCoy sense and semisimple in the Jacobson sense.