Abstract: Discrete ordinate method is one of the main stream methods for radiation shielding calculation of nuclear systems. Spatial discretization errors, an essential part of deterministic transport procedure, have a vital effect to the accuracy of shielding calculation. It is a challenge to get an accurate solution throughout the entire computational domain by traditional spatial discretization, because of the strong heterogeneity in realistic problems. Based on linear discontinuous finite element method, two-mesh-based and residual-based error estimators were employed to drive the adaptive mesh refinement process. Using tree-based hexahedron grids with hanging nodes, the traditional transport sweep order was improved and the coarse-fine mapping conserved the zeroth and first spatial moment. Numerical results indicate that linear discontinuous finite element method has relative good ray propagation property and spatial convergence property, and the adaptive algorithm can refine regions which contain discontinuous flux, steep flux gradient and optical thick grids. The number of meshes for adaptive algorithm can be reduced by about 1 order of magnitude and the efficiency of shielding calculation increases significantly.