  The precise location of the water ice condensation front ('snow line') in the
protosolar nebula has been a debate for a long time. Its importance stems from
the expected substantial jump in the abundance of solids beyond the snow line,
which is conducive to planet formation, and from the higher stickiness in
collisions of ice-coated dust grains, which may help the process of coagulation
of dust and the formation of planetesimals. In an optically thin nebula, the
location of the snow line is easily calculated to be around 3 AU. However, in
its first 5 to 10 million years, the solar nebula was optically thick, implying
a smaller snow line radius due to shielding from direct sunlight, but also a
larger radius because of viscous heating. Several models have attempted to
treat these opposing effects. However, until recently treatments beyond an
approximate 1+1D radiative transfer were unfeasible. We revisit the problem
with a fully self-consistent 3D treatment in an axisymmetric disk model,
including a density-dependent treatment of the dust and ice sublimation. We
find that the location of the snow line is very sensitive to the opacities of
the dust grains and the mass accretion rate of the disk. We show that previous
approximate treatments are quite efficient at determining the location of the
snow line if the energy budget is locally dominated by viscous accretion. We
derive an analytic estimate of the location of the snow line that compares very
well with results from this and previous studies. Using solar abundances of the
elements we compute the abundance of dust and ice and find that the expected
jump in solid surface density at the snow line is smaller than previously
assumed. We further show that in the inner few AU the refractory species are
partly evaporated, leading to a significantly smaller solid state surface
density in the regions where the rocky planets were formed.
