What your describing is barging smolt around all the dams.
And those studies that are trying to say interaction of wild and hatchery stocks actually help wild fish is right out of the jackwagon play book.
Hatchery breeding with wild = nothing returns.
The Snake River once represented 50% of the salmon and steelhead produced in the Columbia Basin, the four lower Snake River Dams block over 70% of the original spawning habitat on the Snake River.
Hatchery fish were barged down the Snake and Columbia, not wild fish. I don't know of any article that *tries* to say that hatchery fish are floating wild populations. Many research projects just happen to find this simple fact out by taking genetic samples.
Seeing as you don't think that hatchery fish are capable of producing viable adults, I encourage you to type in "hatchery wild steelhead" into google scholar.
This one is interesting because the authors were already very biased in their assumption that hatchery fish were not capable of producing any viable returning adults, so much that they admit it in the beginning of the discussion section. In the same paragraph, they also admit that they were wrong about this assumption.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n03443v677584m52/ I'm afraid your being fed dam hugger wishful thinking junk science.
Here's what the Fish Passage Center had to say about the viability of barging fish.
Further, it's not my opinion that hatchery fish are inferior when it comes to breeding in the wild, it's what most fisheries scientists that don't work for hydro electric producers have been saying for years.
http://www.bluefish.org/survival.htmCollection and Transportation by Barge
During migration season, salmon and steelhead are collected, transferred and transported by specially designed barges where they are released below Bonneville dam, the last dam before the ocean. For decades, the Army Corps of Engineers has suggested that collection and barging provides adequate salmon survival. The recent "Comparative Survival Study" by Fish Passage Center (11/26/3) suggests otherwise:
Little or no transport benefits were evident in most years for Snake River wild chinook based on available PIT tag data, 1994-2000.
Delayed mortality was evident for transported Snake River chinook smolts, which died at a greater rate after release below Bonneville Dam than smolts that migrated through the hydrosystem.
Smolt-to-Adult return ratio (SAR) of transported and in-river migrants were much less than the 2-6% SAR needed to recover Snake River spring/summer chinook.
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