Takeyuki Inagaki, the head of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant run by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), told a press conference Friday that they planned "to start up the reactor on February 9".

The glitch was linked to the setting on an alarm and did not affect the safe operation of the plant, he said.

Operations to relaunch a reactor at the plant in Niigata province last month were suspended just hours into the process.

The facility had been offline since Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after a colossal earthquake and tsunami sent three reactors at the Fukushima atomic plant into meltdown in 2011.