Which Safe do you need?

A few simple questions will help determine the safe best suited to your requirements.

• What do you need to protect?
  Cash and valuables, Papers or Magnetic media such as CDs, cassettes, tapes etc.
• What type of protection do you need?
  Security, Fire resistance or both
• What is the total worth of the cash or valuables in the safe?
• How much space is available?

You can view the entire product list here

Security Safes

Our range of Security Safes are designed to protect cash and valuables from theft. All security safes show their “Insurance Rating”.

It is essential that you select a product with the appropriate rating for your requirements and that meets with the approval of your underwriter.

Security safes fall into two categories:

Ungraded safes which are not formally tested but can provide the required level of protection.  For these safes the European Insurance Industry has set up a classification system to which the safes are assigned. Using various characteristics, safes are classified in categories SAFE1 to SAFE4 which correspond to a lower or higher degree of protection.  This is line with EN14450.

	Cash	Valuables
Safe 1	£1000.00	£10.000.00
Safe 2	£2,000.00	£20,000.00
Safe 3	£4,000.00	£40,000.00
Safe 4	£6,000.00	£60,000.00

Graded safes Our graded safes are rated one of two ways:

1. According to EN 1143-1. This is a European standard that lists the requirements to be fulfilled by security safes in order to be given a particular Euro Class grading. During this test the safes are opened completely or partially and the time this takes and the tools required to achieve this are reflected in the grading.
2. VdS** classification
   This is an internationally recognized certification awarded by VdS Schadenverh.¼tung* the independent, international, accredited and notified testing and certification institution for physical and electronic protection against intrusion. VdS inspects and certifies products as well as services for the safety and security industry. All procedures follow standards and rules established by VdS in cooperation with the insurance industry and international organizations. The VdS mark of approval stands for quality and reliability wherever safety and security matters.

* “Schadenverh.¼tung” is the German word for loss prevention.

** Click here to visit VDS

Click here to view our range of Security Safes

Click here to view our range of Graded Security Safes

Fire Resistant Paper Safes, Cupboards & Cabinets
Our range of Fire Resistant Paper safes, cupboards and cabinets are designed to protect any type of paper based documents in the event of a fire. As a minimum all these products are built in accordance with DIN 4102 which requires 30 minutes fire resistance.

Items offering greater fire resistance have been formally tested and certified by a recognized testing house such as Underwriters Laboratories or SINTEF.

These products are not suitable for the protection of magnetic media.

Click here to view our range of Fire Resistant Safes

Data Safes
Data media is increasingly an integral part of our daily lives but few people recognise the vulnerability of this resource. Data media are increasingly sensitive and are vulnerable to destruction at much lower temperatures than paper. Equally, exposure to various elements such as heat, dust, water, light will adversely affect the durability of such equipment. Therefore, it is vital that the correct storage is provided to protect important data media and our Data Safe product ranges are designed to protect all types of magnetic media (discs, tapes, cartridges etc.) in the event of a fire. Whereas paper begins to corrupt at 175c, magnetic media (data carriers) can be damaged by temperatures as low as 52c making the additional protection offered by our data safes essential.

Click here to view our range of Data Safes

Our sales team are always on hand to advise you, why not give us a call now on 0845 124 9955.

Alternatively, complete our enquiry form and a member of the team will contact you within 24 hours

The lasers concentrate huge amounts of energy into a tiny point

When the first lasers were developed in the 1960s they were described as “a solution looking for a problem.”

Today, the beams of light are ubiquitous, crammed into everything from CD players and phone networks to supermarket checkouts and research laboratories. They have found many problems to solve.

But if an international team led by UK scientists gets its way, lasers could soon face their biggest challenge yet: solving the world’s energy crisis in an environmentally friendly way.

Researchers from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, working with partners from 14 countries, have tabled a proposal to use lasers to recreate the physical reactions at the heart of the Sun.

In just one cubic kilometre of seawater there is the equivalent energy of the world’s oil reserves Mike Dunne

Harnessing nuclear fusion, as the process is known, would offer almost unlimited energy without the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

A proposal to fund the set-up costs of a project called Hiper (High Power Laser Energy Research) is currently being considered by the EU.

If the team gets the 50m Euros (£35m) it is asking for to kick-start the project, it would put the researchers on a path that could eventually see an 800m-euro (£500m) working demonstration reactor opened towards the end of the next decade, and commercial reactors soon after that.

“This is not an immediate solution to the world’s energy demand,” admits Professor Mike Dunne, director of the project at RAL. “But if we’re very aggressive you could have a power reactor on the ground by 2030.”

Burning hot

Nuclear fusion has long been a dream of scientists. The idea is to fuse together two heavier forms of hydrogen, known as deuterium and tritium, to form helium.

These isotopes of hydrogen are readily available.

“In just one cubic kilometre of seawater there is the equivalent energy of the world’s oil reserves,” says Professor Dunne. “So it’s almost limitless fuel.”

LASER FUSION

1. Powerful lasers irradiate a fuel capsule causing the outer layer to rapidly expand.

2. The fuel capsule’s core increases in density, converging at the tip of a gold cone.

3. An intense ignition laser is fired into the gold cone producing energetic electrons.

4. Electrons bombard the fuel raising its temperature to 100 million Celsius, initiating fusion.

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When the isotopes are combined at high temperatures, a small amount of mass is lost and a colossal amount of energy is released. By-products are no more radioactive than hospital waste.

In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressure allows this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius. At the much lower pressures on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher – above 100 million Celsius.

Hiper would achieve these extreme temperatures using ultra powerful lasers – some will concentrate the equivalent of ten thousand times the power of the national grid into a spot less than a millimetre across.

The whole scheme has been drawn up to capitalise on a US project at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Scheduled for completion in 2010, the massive NIF laser is expected to prove to the world that laser fusion will work and should be taken seriously.

“That will move it from the scientific field to the public and political field,” says Professor Dunne.

“Everything from then on is just mere detail – it’s technology and engineering.”

Commercial reality

The NIF laser and Hiper take very different approaches to laser fusion. Professor Dunne compares it to the differences between a diesel and petrol engine.

“Nif is the diesel approach,” he says. “You shine lasers at a pellet of material and compress it to such a point that its temperature and density reach a point that allows fusion reactions.”

It sounds like a lot of money, but in the greater scheme of things, half a billion dollars to solve the world’s energy problems is nothing Mike Dunne

In contrast, Hiper will use two sets of lasers: one to compress the fuel pellet and another, like a spark plug, to ignite it. Using this set up means that the fuel does not need to be compressed as much as it does with NIF, overcoming a major hurdle.

“It’s like trying to squeeze jelly,” explains Professor Bob Bingham, also of the RAL. “You want to squeeze in a way that it doesn’t come back out through your fingers. That really is the key.”

Nif engineers get round this problem by using ultra precise lasers and near-perfect shaped fuel pellets, both of which are delicate, time consuming and unlikely to be ever viable routes to a commercial reactor.

Using the secondary laser, a technique first demonstrated by Japanese scientists, means the machinery of Hiper can be a bit more rough and ready.

Small cost

But the Hiper team will not have it all its own way.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the lasers, particularly getting them to fire rapidly enough to sustain fusion in a reactor.

At the moment, large powerful lasers need several minutes to draw in enough power to fire. A laser fusion reactor would need to fire several times a second and be an order of magnitude more efficient than today’s beams.

ITER – NUCLEAR FUSION PROJECT Project estimated to cost 10bn euros and will run for 35 years It aims to produce the first sustained fusion reactions Final stage before full prototype of commercial reactor is built Q&A: Iter reactor

“The lasers required have never been realised,” says Dr Duarte Borba, who works at JET, a fusion reactor down the road from where the Hiper team are based.

Jet takes another approach to nuclear fusion, using superconducting magnets to contain and fuse the hydrogen nuclei.

This is the same technique used by the poster child of nuclear fusion: the 10bn-euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) currently being built in Cadarache, southern France.

“The main technology for magnetic fusion has already been designed and tested,” says Dr Borba. “What is need is to integrate everything into one project and show that it works. That’s where Iter comes in.”

The scheme will run for 35 years and if all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040, perhaps giving the Hiper team enough time to steal a march on its magnetic rivals.

A decision on whether to fund the initial stages of Hiper will be announced by the EU in July 2007. And once the ball is rolling, the scientists and engineers hope it will be a proposition politicians cannot ignore.

“It sounds like a lot of money,” says Professor Dunne. “But in the greater scheme of things, half a billion dollars to solve the world’s energy problems is nothing.”

Others already seem to agree.

The UK funding bodies, including the Science and Technology Facilities Council that own and operate most of the UK’s large science instruments, are making positive noises about stumping up the necessary cash to build and host Hiper in the UK.

“We will be considering whether to put it into our roadmap towards the end of the year and I think the likelihood is that we will,” said Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the STFC. “We are very interested in Hiper.”