What Happens When You Mix Molten Salt And Oil?

We love some fireballs around here. While we aren’t exactly pyromaniacs, we do have a couple of guys who manage to get their eyebrows singed a couple of times a year while “experimenting” around the Speed Society headquarters. Something we’ve never experimented with is molten salt, and to be honest, until we saw this video. That may change soon, but for now, we’re just going to watch as YouTuber The King of Random shows us what happens when you mix molten salt with three different types of oil.

We’re going to do the smart thing here (because our attorney’s hate when we don’t cover out butts) and tell all of you right now: DO NOT TRY THIS. Not at home, not at work, not even if you have a concrete dome with a dirt floor, like the King of Random himself uses. JUST. DON’T. We don’t want to see any videos showing our fans with burns to themselves or their property, so just leave this kind of thing up to the professionals, please!

Now, on to the show itself. The King himself has a furnace on hand to bring the heat to the tune of some 1,800 degrees, more than enough to melt salt into liquid and make it pourable, which is when the fun begins. The temperature of the molten salt is well above the temperature at which the oil ignites, and as you might imagine, when you pour the liquid salt into the oil, things get toasty really quickly.

The first oil, a cooking oil you might find in any given pantry in the country, catches on fire immediately, flaming up a couple of feet before settling to a small flame that would have probably burned for quite a while if left to do so. The next “oil” wasn’t actually oil, but a combination of fatty oils and some other ingredients that we all know as butter. The butter also ignites, but doesn’t burn as intensely or as long as the cooking oil. Finally, a little motor oil, which also ignites and burns until extinguished.

The most fun of the day was when our host tossed a little water onto the oil fires, sending a fireball skyward that that would have made the early nuclear tests envious. Good times, but not something we want our people out there trying on their own!