If it’s just for steam why make it different?
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The “smoke stacks” at nuclear plants are for “gaseous effluent discharge”. You can see these very clearly in this photo: https://imgur.com/a/JAstQXj
During normal operation of a nuclear plant, the entire building is kept under slight vacuum. This ensures that air only leaks in – and the air coming in from outside follows a specific path from clean areas, into low radiological risk areas, then medium risk, then high risk, then finally into giant fans which go into special filters – then finally, the air after being filtered goes out of the “smoke stack”.
This ensures that if there is a leak of radioactive material in the reactor vault, the only place that leak can go is into the filters, and in the unlikely event that anything that gets through the filters gets released high up above the plant, so it doesn’t contaminate the rest of the plant. Because the air flow is carefully designed to go from low risk to high risk, a reactor vault leak won’t contaminate the offices or generator room.
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