WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., is calling for the Energy Department to withdraw a $450,000 Yucca Mountain contract given to a consulting company whose board contains several former executives of the nuclear waste project.

"They are up to their eyeballs in conflict," Berkley said of the department and the company, Longenecker & Associates.

The company's president, John Longenecker, said Thursday that no conflict exists. He said that the firm's bid was formed expressly to avoid conflict and that the company has a reputation for "candid" performance.

"This couldn't be more straight up," Longenecker said.

A Department of Energy spokesman indicated that the contract would stand.

"These criticisms are meritless," spokesman Allen Benson said. "We have every expectation that the firm will produce an independent review of value to the program."

For its relatively small sum, the contract has generated the latest controversy for Nevada officials and other Yucca critics to challenge DOE's management of the repository program.

The department hired Longenecker & Associates last week to review engineering processes at Yucca Mountain, where the government proposes to build an underground and above-ground complex to manage and bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste.

Longenecker, which has performed quality assurance assessments and other work on the Yucca project, is an international engineering, environmental and energy consulting company based in Henderson.

Energy Department officials stated that the review would be independent, but Yucca critics said otherwise after the former ties of several Longenecker associates were disclosed.

The company's 14-member senior management team includes Ronald A. Milner, chief operating officer for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management from 1996 to 2006. The office oversees the Yucca project.

Among 10 outside board members listed on the Longenecker Web site is Donald Pearman, who was deputy general manager of the nuclear waste effort while employed by Bechtel SAIC, its managing contractor.

Donald G. Horton, who managed the development of the Yucca Mountain site recommendation report, also is listed among Longenecker personnel.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement this week that retaining the company was like "hiring a student who is failing in literature to grade his own term paper."

"The DOE is planning to waste half a million more taxpayer dollars on work that will ultimately be meaningless because the company hired to conduct the review has a major conflict of interest," Reid said.

Unlike Berkley, Reid stopped short of demanding the contract be rescinded.

"He did not make that call," spokesman Jon Summers said. "Is it incumbent on him to call on people to do what is right?"

Longenecker, the company president, said the associates with Yucca Mountain backgrounds are at arm's length from the project.

He said Milner and Horton are part-time consultants who perform no Yucca-related work. Pearman is on the company's board "in an advisory capacity and is not a consultant to us."

"None of them were involved in the bid, and none of them will work on the project," Longenecker said. "Any allegation to that effect is just baseless."

A 10-person review team will be drawn from among senior engineers at four partner companies, including Northrop Corp. and Fluor Corp., Longenecker said.

"We won this because we proposed very senior people who have run multibillion dollar projects before," he said.

Berkley renewed a call for the White House to establish "an independent investigation into all aspects of the work now being done at Yucca Mountain. They said no to this plan for fear it would expose additional problems" at the delayed nuclear waste site.

"Unfortunately, this latest effort seems to be more of the same when it comes to ignoring the concerns of those who disagree with the Yucca Mountain Project," Berkley said.